Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When middle school students learn science content withgraphs, the graphing and science knowledge may be mutuallyreinforcing: understanding the science content may help stu-dents interpret a related graph, and information from a graphmay illustrate a scientific concept. We examine this relation-ship between graphing and science by studying how studentslearn from interactive computer models with accompanyingdata graphs. The computer models provide an animated simu-lation that illustrates an unobservable phenomenon, while thedata graph tracks one or more quantities over time. This or-dering study, on middle school students learning about photo-synthesis, indicates that engaging with novel graph conceptshelped students interpret their data as they experimented withthe computer model. The study also provided some supportfor the opposite direction: experimenting with the model firsthelped students make sense of the graphs.