Using students’ visual representations as a window to designing learning tools

Abstract

We report the preliminary findings of a study that considered how undergraduate students visually represent dynamic processes of a biological complex system. Initial results indicate that students created structure-focused visuals and relied on visual representations they had previously encountered in their studies. We suggest that the results of this paper can inform how computer-based learning tools could be designed to prompt students to think about the relationships between structure, behaviour, and function, thereby aiding their understanding of how biological complex systems work.