Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 10, Issue 1, Article 3 (June, 2009) Carl-Johan RUNDGREN & Richard HIRSCH & Lena A. E. TIBELL Death of metaphors in life science? - A study of upper secondary and tertiary students’ use of metaphors in their meaning-making of scientific content Previous Contents Next

Data analysis

In the analysis on which this paper is based, the focus was on the students’ use of semiotic resources, more specifically verbal semiotic resources such as scientific terms, metaphors etc. in their meaning-making of the content of the visualizations. The students’ statements were categorized and colour-coded as deictic expressions, domain-specific expressions (scientific terms and metaphors used by the scientific community), metaphors used in teaching, and spontaneous metaphors. In the next step of the analysis, the colour-coded words were related to the context of the interview and from this an evaluation of whether it was part of a scientifically meaningful explanation or not was made. The transcripts were analyzed iteratively according to the method of analytical induction (Abell & Smith, 1994); they were read several times and categorized independently by two different researchers.