Exploring Semiosis in Australian Tertiary Students’ Digital Representations of Science within a Systemic Functional Semiotic Framework

The fundamental concern of this thesis is multimodal semiosis in the pedagogical context of tertiary science education. Specifically, the study explores the construal of meaning in student-made digital multimedia in two subjects, pharmacology and pre-service science teacher education, that reflect the growing breadth of their use in both specialised and generalist areas of tertiary science education in Australia. Such assessment tasks represent a relatively recent addition to the array of assessments employed in tertiary science education. Consequently, the understanding of their semiotic potential, functionality, and capacity for building and communicating scientific knowledge is only in its infancy. Therefore, the exploratory work of this thesis aims to better understand how student-made digital multimedia function to convey scientific knowledge to specific audiences.The assessment artefacts examined in this study are dynamic standalone presentations [DSPs], a multimodal format that enables students to integrate a wide range of semiotic modes and mechanisms to communicate scientific meanings. Although theoretical work on dynamic digital media in science education is limited, analytical approaches developed in the field of multimodality have proven effective in exploring various complex media artefacts. To understand the communicative potential of the DSPs, this thesis employs a Systemic Functional Semiotics approach (Bateman et al., 2017; Halliday, 1978; Martin, 2006; O’Halloran, 2008) to multimodality. Explicitly concerned with the construal of meaning in context, this approach provides a theoretically robust and fine-grained characterisation of the communicative functions that these artefacts serve in the context of science education. Such careful exploration of the artefacts’ communicative affordances is essential for makers, educators, and researchers to engage with them productively in both practice and theory.The semiotic analysis is complemented by a discussion of student-makers’ accounts of producing their DSPs. Thematic analysis of interview data is utilised to explore students’ production of their artefacts and to probe their understanding of the communicative possibilities afforded by dynamic multimedia. Specifically, students’ responses are interrogated to identify factors that have shaped their semiotic choices regarding the semiotic technologies used and the semiotic resources selected.The multimodal understandings developed in this thesis have important pedagogical implications. Given that these artefacts are used for assessment purposes, there is a pedagogic imperative to consider how students can be best supported in communicating scientific meanings through novel forms. This research addresses this need by articulating ‘what counts’ in such artefacts, clarifying how particular communicative purposes can be achieved, and revealing the consequences of particular expressive choices. Such understandings are essential for instructors to be able to effectively scaffold makers’ production processes, to support the development of students’ multimodal literacy in science and contribute to the rigorous evaluation of the effectiveness of dynamic multimodal phenomena in science education.