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Our research program is concerned with the trajectory of individuals from their initial participation in science-related activities to their full participation in scientific research. This study was designed to provide answers to questions about (a) the practices required for reading graphs in high school textbooks and scientific journals, and (b) the role of high school textbooks in the appropriation of authentic scientific graph-related practices. For our analyses, we selected five leading ecology-related journals and six representative high school biology textbooks. Although there were no differences in the total number of inscriptions used in journals and textbooks, there were significant differences in the frequency with which Cartesian graphs were used. To allow more detailed analyses, an ontology of graphs was developed. Our fine-grained analyses based on this ontology yielded qualitative differences between the uses of graphs and associated captions and main text as they appeared in high school textbooks and scientific journals. Scientific journals provided more resources to facilitate graph reading and more elaborate descriptions and interpretations of graphs than the high school textbooks. Implications of this study are outlined as they relate to (a) producing graphs, captions, and main text in high school textbooks; and (b) teaching and researching graph-related practices from anthropological perspectives. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 36: 977–1019, 1999
Roth et al. (Mon,) studied this question.