This article attempts to highlight inscriptions, i.e., photographs, drawings, diagrams, or graphs as autonomous carriers of meaning that can illuminate the different dimensions of a scientific concept. In addition, the article examines the inherent potential of diverse types of inscriptions to be combined with each other creating conceptual sequences and thus, crafting a narrative for the formation of a concept. For the formation of conceptual sequences the proper synthesis of both naturalistic and abstractive inscriptions that hold different types of information and complement each other is suggested. That is, inscriptions such as photographs that hold morphological relevance with their referent describing at the same time the everyday knowledge, as well as inscriptions such as graphs or equations that, from a morphological perspective, have a no linear connection to their referent and are related to the typical visual code of school knowledge. Thus, existing, transformed, or novel inscriptions can create conceptual continuums offering logical connections between visual codes from everyday experience and the codes of diagrams, graphs, and equations. From both the teachers and the students, when inscriptions cooperate with the human body, oral language, and other elements of the space, constitute a critical aspect in multimodal communication within school classrooms.

Despite the growing body of research on the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on children’s wellbeing, few studies so far have explored children’s points of view, while the majority were based on data collected during the first year of the pandemic. The present study attempted to capture children’s views 1 year after the beginning of the pandemic, and to this end, data were collected during Spring 2021 in Greece. Specifically, by combining verbal and visual data, the study attempted to explore children’s views of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 preventive practices. Participants involved 320 children, ranging in age from 4 to 12 years, who were asked to verbally describe and draw (a) Coronavirus and (b) the preventive measures adopted to mitigate the pandemic. Data analysis indicated that overall, children’s views involve elements of scientifically appropriate information since from an early age they are able to describe and depict SARS-CoV-2 in ways that reflect the abundance of available verbal and visual information in the public sphere. Moreover, children recommended suitable COVID-19 preventive practices since their verbal and drawing responses included references to both the Hygienic and Social preventive practices that prevailed during the time of data collection. Age-related differences in children’s views, as well as differences between the two data collection techniques, were also found. Results also showed that children who described SARS-CoV-2 as a virus or a germ tended to report more hygienic practices than those who failed to describe the term appropriately. The findings shed light on the way children form their views of the novel coronavirus and COVID-19 and raise research educational implications.

A concept map is a powerful method that promotes meaningful learning and is highly recommended for use in biology classes. According to multimedia research, the effectiveness of concept maps could be improved by incorporating pictorial elements. Apart from using realistic images, a new field of research claims that specific design manipulations, including human-like features with appealing colors (emotional design), influence learners’ affective state and improve learning. A positive affective state is assumed to evoke emotions and provoke deeper cognitive processing, which increases the cognitive resources available for a task. We conducted two experiments with a total of N = 249 junior high school students, comparing the effect of concept maps with emotional design illustrations (emotional design), with non-emotional design illustrations (neutral design), and without illustrations (control design). Experiment 1 examined the influence of these designs on students’ perceived affective state, perceived cognitive load (extraneous, intrinsic, and germane load), perceived task difficulty, and learning performance (n = 202), experiment 2 focused on the perceived affective state of the students (n = 47). We found that emotional design led to a significant decrease in perceived task difficulty, but we neither found an effect on learning performance nor the positive affective state. Learning with pictorial concept maps (in emotional or neutral design) reduced the negative affect compared to learning with control concept maps. Other than expected, the neutral design led to reduced perceived extraneous and intrinsic cognitive load. Consequently, in terms of learning, emotional design in concept maps did not hamper learning but did not foster it either.