Understanding the Invisible

Fostering Students’ Structure-behaviour Reasoning with Multi-level Thought by Using Design

Abstract

In design education the relationship between a prototype’s structure and its behaviour is an important one. In traditional fields such as mechanics and engineering, for example bridges or steam engines, both the structures and their structure-derived behaviour are observable. This visibility facilitates reasoning how this structure relates to behaviour and function. In more contemporary fields of technology like, ICT, nanotechnology and chemical engineering, however, the observable (macro-level) behaviour of a design often results from structural features at a non-observable scale. Consequently reasoning about structure and behaviour in these domains requires so-called multi-level thinking: using representations of micro level structures to explain or predict a macro-level phenomenon. Secondary school students often struggle with such structure-behaviour reasoning (SBR), particularly when it involves connecting invisible micro-level structures with observed behaviour. Likewise, teachers face the challenge of teaching ‘the invisible’ and assessing students’ proficiency in SBR. Chemical design activities can provide for valuable opportunities to address this challenge. By linking the molecular-level structure with the observed behaviour and design requirements, such activities can foster students’ SBR. In this research study we identified and characterized changes in students’ level of SBR in written answers to a prompt question before and after engagement in a chemical design activity. First, the students’ written answers were converted into reasoning diagrams. Then, these diagrams visualised students’ modes of reasoning and enabled categorization in one of the five levels. A small scale pilot test (N=16) revealed an increase in the level of sophistication of students’ written explanations with a modest effect size. Currently a large-scale data collection and analysis is in progress. At the conference we will present the results from the complete data set.