While there has been much interest in the power of student-generated multiple representations to promote student reasoning and conceptual understanding, most studies of student explanations have been of written artefacts or only included diagrams as an adjunct to written explanations. This approach may be because teachers do not have an accessible framework with which to evaluate students’ diagrams as being explanations. Adapting de Andrade et al.’s Research in Science Education, 49, 787-807 (2019) evaluation framework for written explanations, this study explored the benefits and limitations of a framework to evaluate students’ explanatory diagrams. Seventeen grade 5 and 6 students produced a series of explanatory diagrams over six chemistry lessons on particle theory. Their diagrams were coded and evaluated using the proposed diagram analysis framework. Some sample diagrams are included to illustrate how the framework assisted the evaluation of students’ diagrams. The framework helped identify key features of students’ diagrams and evaluate their explanatory powers consistently and effectively. This research also indicates that a series of stand-alone diagrams can effectively be used by teachers to assess how students communicate their understanding of causal explanations in terms of sub-microscopic entities of the underlying phenomena.

尽管人们对学生产生的多种表示形式具有促进学生推理和概念理解的能力很感兴趣，但大多数学生解释研究都是书面手工艺品，或仅包括图表作为书面解释的辅助手段。这种方法可能是因为教师没有可访问的框架来评估学生的图表作为解释。改编de Andrade等人的《科学教育研究》，49787-807（2019）的书面说明的评估框架，本研究探讨了评估学生的解释图的框架的优点和局限性。17名5年级和6年级的学生在六个关于粒子理论的化学课程上制作了一系列解释性图表。使用提出的图表分析框架对他们的图表进行编码和评估。其中包括一些示例图，以说明该框架如何帮助评估学生的图。该框架有助于识别学生图表的关键特征，并持续有效地评估其解释能力。