Grade 8 students appropriating Sankey diagrams: The first cycle in an educational design research

Abstract

Many students do not experience usefulness in mathematics. To address this problem, we offered them a mathematical tool, Sankey diagrams, which is a flow chart appearing in news media to visualize social, industrial or environmental processes. We carried out an Educational Design Research (EDR) to develop and evaluate lesson materials about contextualized Sankey diagrams. We tested these materials with a class of grade 8 students and evaluated these on the feasibility of students’ appropriation of the diagrams. In the lesson, we observed how students were able to read the Sankey diagrams, liked the societal processes visualized, yet did not fully grasp their mathematical properties. However, weeks later, the same students skillfully used Sankey diagrams in an unrelated project, which showed they needed time for their learning. Our contributions are that (1) grade 8 students can appropriate Sankey diagrams and use these in situations relevant to them, (2) design researchers should consider long-term learning effects beyond the experimental phase in EDR. We recommend educational designers to innovate curricula and introduce diagrams from news media to make students experience usefulness in school content.