The overarching aim is to develop pedagogies to improve the achievement of lower SES students in physics, chemistry and biology from years 10-12. We will seek to do this though establishing discipline-specific visual and verbal literacies for cumulative learning in science pedagogy. This will be achieved by:

1. Determining the similarities and differences among the meaning-making resources of language and images in school physics, chemistry and biology and describing how these resources vary across years 10-12;
2. Developing pedagogies where students actively inquire into and advance their understanding of progressively advanced scientific knowledge through infused discipline-specific visual, verbal and symbolic literacies leading to their critical appreciation and understanding of canonical scientific representations;
3. Including in such pedagogies explicit attention to relating forms of representation involved in acquiring and displaying knowledge in the classroom to those required for written assessment tasks and examinations;
4. Investigating how pedagogies incorporating critical investigation and exploratory and guided formulation of multiple forms of representation of science concepts can enhance students’ cumulative knowledge building from the junior to senior high school years.