Mechanistic reasoning is a powerful form of reasoning central to scientific explanations. Despite mechanistic reasoning being an important dimension of scientific practice and a central dimension of science curricula, students face difficulties in developing such type of reasoning. Many authors have been proposing tools for supporting its development; drawing is one such tool. Studies that purposefully explore how drawing leverages and supports students' mechanistic reasoning while engage in a process of constructing explanations are still scarce. The goal of the current study was to understand how students' mechanistic reasoning emerges and is enacted when students are jointly involved in drawing creation. For that, we drew on a recent framework that identifies essential characteristics of students' mechanistic reasoning and also on theories of distributed and embodied cognition. In this paper, we present a pair of middle school students who jointly explain a chemical phenomenon by creating drawings and reasoning with them. Using a fine‐grain analysis we examined the elements of students' mechanistic reasoning in relation to drawing creation and how talk and embodied actions on and with the drawings were used to support students' reasoning. Findings reveal that drawings played a key role in paving the way for students reasoning about mechanisms and in enacting mechanistic reasoning. In particular, drawings were essential for pushing students to look for a mechanism, for enabling and supporting mechanistic reasoning‐in‐action, and for facilitating productive interactions between the students that ended up in the construction of a sophisticated mechanistic explanation.

Drawing is recognized as a powerful tool to learn science. Although current research has enriched our understanding of the potential of learning through drawing, scarce attention has been given to the social-cognitive interactions that occur when students jointly create drawings to understand and explain phenomena in science. This article is based on the distributed and embodied cognition theories and it adopted the notion of we-space, defined as a complex social-cognitive space, dynamically established and managed during the ongoing interactions of the individuals, when they manipulate and exploit a shared space. The goal of the study was to explore the role that collaborative drawing plays in shaping the social-cognitive interaction among students. We examine this by a fine-grain multimodal analysis of a pair of middle school students, who jointly attempted to understand and explain a chemical phenomenon by creating drawings and thinking with them. Our findings suggest that collaborative drawing played a key role in (i) establishing a genuine shared-action space, a we-space, and that within this we-space it had two major functions: (ii) enabling collective thinking-in-action and (iii) simplifying communication. We argue that drawing, as a joint activity, has a potential for learning, not restricted to the cognitive process related to the activity of creating external visual representations on paper; instead, the benefits of drawing lie in action in space. Creating these representations is more than a process of externalization of thought: it is part of a process of collective thinking-in-action.

A dessecação é uma técnica utilizada pelos produtores de soja com o objetivo de antecipar a colheita. No entanto, para a produção de sementes essa técnica necessita de cuidados, uma vez que alguns dessecantes podem deixar resíduos na semente prejudicando sua qualidade. Objetivou-se com esse estudo avaliar o efeito da aplicação de dessecantes em diferentes épocas sobre a qualidade fisiológica de sementes, após seis meses de armazenamento, de cultivares de soja com diferentes teores de lignina no tegumento. As plantas das cultivares BRS Silvânia RR, BRS Valiosa RR, BRS 245 RR e BRS 247 RR foram dessecadas com os herbicidas Diquat, Paraquat e Glufosinato de amônio, e água como tratamento controle, aplicados quando as sementes apresentavam 30, 40 e 50% de teor de água. Após a colheita e beneficiamento, as sementes foram armazenadas por seis meses em armazém convencional. Para a avaliação da qualidade fisiológica das sementes foram realizados os testes de germinação, emergência, índice de velocidade de emergência, condutividade elétrica e tetrazólio. As sementes das cultivares BRS Silvânia e BRS Valiosa apresentaram menor qualidade fisiológica das sementes do que as cultivares BRS 245 e BRS 247. A dessecação, especialmente quando Glufosinato de amônio foi aplicado, mostrou-se mais prejudicial à qualidade fisiológica das sementes de soja do que os demais tratamentos.

The current study examines the progress of 8th-grade student drawings and written explanations of chemical phenomenon, subsequent to being involved in an instructional strategy that explicitly involves drawing as a supportive toll to construct scientific explanations. Additionally, the study examines the association between the representation of specific conceptual elements, such as structure, motion, and interactions, and the explanatory level of students’ written explanations. These goals were addressed by comparing the students’ collected drawings and explanations by applying the same open-ended question before and after the instructional strategy. Results show that after the instructional strategy significantly more students created more accurate drawings and drawings depicting more conceptual elements. Additionally, the students’ written explanations significantly changed, progressing from descriptive accounts to discussions of specific underlying mechanisms at the submicroscopic level. Furthermore, the association between students’ written explanations and drawings was stronger after the strategy. This study strengthens the argument for drawing interaction in explanation construction.

From the many forms that scientific explanations may take, mechanistic explanations have been regarded as valuable in science and science education for their explanatory power. As a result, several frameworks have been proposed to analyse and characterise students’ mechanistic explanations, particularly in chemistry and biology. However, there is a lack of research on students’ mechanistic explanations in other scientific domains, such as physics and particularly astronomy. To address this gap, I revisited an existing analytical framework originally developed for chemistry and refined it to enable the characterisation of students’ mechanistic explanations across different scientific domains. Here, I present the refined analytical framework, which allows for the characterisation of mechanistic explanations at various levels of complexity. The framework enables the characterisation of explanations across scientific domains in progressive explanatory levels, from accounts that describe what happened at the phenomenon level to accounts that describe the underlying mechanisms behind a given phenomenon.