PICTURE TO LEARN JR.: VISUAL PRECONCEPTIONS IN BIOCHEMICAL PROCESSES OF CHILDREN BETWEEN 9 – 12 YEARS OLD

The goal of our research was to explore visual preconceptions in biochemical processes of children between 9 – 12 years old. Certain concept areas have received extensive treatment from researchers, while other are relatively unexplored and still others, such as aspects of inorganic and organic chemistry are untouched. Inspired by this literature based statement, we focused on the fermentation processes and used a contest variant of the ‘picture to learn’ project (Harvard) in order to collect 107 valid drawings in our database. By using an expert panel, we were able to find patterns in the visualization of scientific understanding. Based on an extended categorization we built a ‘stamp collection’ of visual preconceptions and made an attempt to qualify some new phenomena such as ‘entomologisering’ (children have a tendency to draw ‘insects’ as a metaphor for living things at a micro level) and ‘stepladdering’ (children use visual aids, such as stepladders, to get over knowledge imperfections).