Las representaciones pictóricas como problema de aprendizaje: el caso de equilibrio químico

This study is based on three premises: 1) science is a discourse; 2) linguistic and pictorial representational systems are not equivalent, but complementary; 3) external pictorial representation are full of content but the relationship between Sign and Referent is abstract and arbitrary in academic contexts, so cultural processes are necessary for an individual to establish that relationship. However, students encounter many difficulties in appropriating discourse. These may include not knowing the signs, inability to relate the sign to the phenomenon or to make transferences between different types of representations. We proposed a teaching intervention aimed at increasing knowledge of signs. Students were asked to create external pictorial representations and linguistic representations in different formats and these were subjected to content analysis. The information recovered through the process of reading-interpreting-understanding is affected by the format of the external pictorial representation included in the text