Using a diagrammatic approach to reveal variations in students’ instructional representations about the five kingdoms in biology between two cultural groups

This study based on cognitive and social semiotic theories investigates whether the influence of specific features of instructional representation from adolescent textbook images could last until adulthood in certain cultures. Two cultural groups, Indonesian (n = 61) and Taiwanese (n = 60) college students, were recruited from a public Taiwanese university. Reading an essay about how the biological five kingdoms were classified served as the foundation for student-generated drawings. Semi-structured interviews and verbal data were used to track the origin of influences in their drawings. The initial result of coding drawings revealed that most of the drawing structures were shared between groups while only the design of Evolution, revealing sequential taxa in the evolution history, was Taiwanese-specific. Further statistic testing indicated that only participants’ nationality was a significant factor in determining the drawing structure while pedagogical content knowledge is not. A comparison of these results indicated that most Taiwanese representations agreed with that of the non-hierarchical design used in their prior textbook while the Indonesian representations agreed with the hierarchical design of their textbook. The results suggest that there are several competing factors interfering with the decision about image design. Suggestions for teacher education and further study are addressed.