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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: (1) establishing a genuine shared-action space, a "we-space," and that within this "we-space" it had two major functions; (2) enabling collective thinking-in-action; and (3) 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.

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.

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.

This article describes a system of analysis aimed at characterizing students' scientific explanations. Science education literature and reform documents have been highlighting the importance of scientific explanations for students' conceptual understanding and for their understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, and despite general agreement regarding the potential of having students construct their own explanations, a consensual notion of scientific explanation has still not been reached. As a result, within science education literature, there are several frameworks defining scientific explanations, with different foci as well as different notions of what accounts as a "good" explanation. Considering this, and based on a more ample project, we developed a system of analysis to characterize students' explanations. It was conceptualized and developed based on theories and models of scientific explanations, science education literature, and from examples of students' explanations collected by an open-ended questionnaire. With this paper, it is our goal to present the system of analysis, illustrating it with specific examples of students' collected explanations. In addition, we expect to point out its adequacy and utility for analyzing and characterizing students' scientific explanations as well as for tracing their progression.

Pregnancy is a period that is characterized by several metabolic and physiological changes and requires special attention, especially with regard to the relationship between feeding and foetal development. Therefore, the objective of this study was to evaluate whether the practice of voluntary physical exercise (VPE) in combination with chronic consumption of fructose (FRU) from the beginning of life and/or until the gestational period causes genotoxic changes in pregnant females and in their offspring. Seventy Swiss female mice received FRU in the hydration bottle and/or practiced VPE for 8 weeks (prepregnancy/pregnancy). After the lactation period, the offspring groups were separated by sex. It was observed that the consumption of FRU affected the food consumption, serum concentration of FRU, and glycemic profile in the mothers and that the VPE decreases these parameters. In addition, FRU was genotoxic in the mothers' peripheral tissues and VPE had a preventive effect on these parameters. The offspring showed changes in food consumption, serum FRU concentration, and body weight, in addition to an increase in the adiposity index in male offspring in the FRU (FRU) group and a decrease in the FRU + VPE group. FRU leads to hepatic steatosis in the offspring and VPE was able to decrease the area of steatosis. In addition, FRU led to genotoxicity in the offspring and VPE was able to modulate this effect, reducing damages. In conclusion, we observed that all interventions with VPE had nutritional, genetic, and biochemical benefits of the mother and her offspring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]