What’s in a drawing?

Chemistry is full of representations, including in students’ drawings. These drawings represent chemical entities, reactions or processes and offer valuable insight into students’ conceptual understanding.

The concept of noticing – how teachers recognise and interpret important aspects of student work – is underexplored in chemistry education research, particularly in relation to student-generated drawings.

A 2024 study explored how experienced chemistry teachers notice student-generated drawings about electrochemical reactions. Researchers filmed three chemistry teachers and their upper secondary classes, totalling 50 students, carrying out a drawing task. Teachers wore head-mounted cameras to deliver point-of-view footage and the researchers interviewed the teachers immediately after the lesson. This delivered information on in-the-moment noticing. After a period of reflection for the teachers to review the students’ work, the researchers interviewed them again to provide insight into delayed noticing.

Using deductive and inductive coding to make a codebook, the researchers described the features of the drawings recognised by the teachers. The team analysed the data based on whether teachers had used an evaluative approach, simply to judge the accuracy of the drawings, or a sense-making approach, which involved interpreting what the drawings revealed about student thinking.

Teachers identified four main features when analysing student-generated drawings:

• visual form: icons, chemical symbols, mathematical symbols or text
• quantities: amounts, such as the exact number of electrons depicted, or relative distances/sizes, such as two dots of different sizes denoting different ions
• scale: how students represent phenomena at different levels of Johnstone’s triangle
• properties and behaviours: how students illustrate concepts such as structure, movement or state of matter.

By considering the frequency of these features, the researchers identified that delayed noticing uncovered more features compared to in-the-moment noticing. Teachers reported they often noticed more subtle and deeper patterns in student thinking when given time to reflect on drawings after the class.

Each teacher had an individualised pattern of features they noticed. This suggests that noticing is a context-dependent skill influenced by prior experiences, likely related to pedagogical content knowledge.

Teachers’ noticing involved two distinct approaches: evaluation and sense-making. Most noticing instances were evaluation – about four times as frequent as sense-making. Teachers struggled to evaluate more abstract representations, such as dynamic processes that are difficult to capture in static images. They often needed additional information, such as student explanations, before fully understanding the drawing.

There were also many instances of teachers moving between these two modes, first evaluating the technical correctness, then shifting to sense-making to explore the students’ conceptual understanding. This allowed them to both correct errors and gain insights into student thinking.