#131: Causal Reasoning Through Drawing: Explore How Students Organise Their Thoughts in Space.

This study aims to explore how drawing supports students' causal reasoning when the conceptual complexity of distant attentional frames is present. Five pairs of students (ages 11-13) participated in 90-minute drawing sessions, where they attempted to link causes and effects across different attentional frames, specifically reasoning about how local food waste may be linked to the decline of polar bears in a remote region. We identified four linking strategies students came up with: gap narrowing, finding possible channels, identifying mediating steps, and identifying underlying players. In addition, through a multimodal analysis of video recordings, we explored students' actions and interactions with their drawings in specific episodes when they came up with these strategies to propose causal links across spatial gaps. These findings suggest that drawing serves important interactional functions extending beyond its representational one, which in these cases supported sophisticated causal thinking that resembles scientific reasoning strategies.