Abstract

This licentiate thesis examines how students in compulsory school express their understanding of technological systems in technology education, with a focus on the wastewater system. The thesis analyses how students in Grades 6 and 9 express their understanding of system structure, function and relationships, with primary emphasis on their oral descriptions.

The licentiate thesis is based on two empirical studies presented in separate articles. The first study investigates how students in Grade 6 describe and model a wastewater system through self-drawn system models and oral descriptions. The second study investigates how students in Grade 9 express their understanding of the same system, with particular attention to aspects that are less visible in everyday use, such as control and system boundaries. To enable a comparative analysis, the students’ descriptions from both studies were analysed using the same analytical framework.

The comparative analysis draws on a classification model (Hallström et al., 2022) in combination with the SOLO-taxonomy (Biggs & Collis, 1982), enabling an analysis of both which aspects of the system students express and how these aspects are integrated in their descriptions. The results show that students in Grade 9 generally use a greater number of subject-specific concepts than students in Grade 6 and express their descriptions with greater linguistic precision. At the same time, there is no clear relationship between increased concept use and more relational ways of expressing systems understanding, in which relationships between parts and the system as a whole are made explicit.

In both grades, students’ expressions range from fragmented and linear descriptions to more relational descriptions in which different aspects of the system are related to one another. Variation in systems understanding is greater within each grade than between the two grades. Some students in Grade 6 express descriptions corresponding to relational levels of understanding, while some students in Grade 9, despite using more developed language, express a limited understanding of the system as a whole.

The results show that expressions of systems understanding do not follow a linear pattern associated with grade level. Concept use and ways of expressing relationships between parts and the system as a whole emerge as partly distinct aspects in the material. The use of concepts does not always indicate an integrated systems understanding. The findings highlight the need for teaching that explicitly supports students in using concepts to reason about relationships, structure, function and system boundaries in technological systems.

Link to DiVA