Children's representations of learning through drawings

The main purpose of this paper is to describe a drawing-based method able to track down young students' representations of their own learning process. This method is used also to analyze whether the metaphors proposed by learning theorists correspond to those produced by students, and whether students' representation of the learning process is affected by demographic variables. 528 students - from ages six to 10 years old - were asked to draw and comment on the way they imagine what happens in their mind when they learn at school. Mixed method analyses were adopted. Firstly, the drawings were qualitatively assessed through a coding scheme; secondly, a quantitative analysis was run to study the effects of dimensions such as gender and students' grade. The results allowed us to draw two main conclusions: a) the metaphors the literature produced describe only partially how students represent their own learning processes; therefore, students learning representation can be defined as multidimensional; and b) the developmental path of learning representation is observable by grade and, to some extent, by gender. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.