Inscriptions in Educational Research

Abstract

In the social studies of science, inscriptions – everything that appears in research articles other than text – have been studied and theorized extensively. The data in research articles are often reported in the form of one or another inscription: data table, map, photograph, line graph, statistics, or mathematical equation. Not all inscriptions are equally abstract or equally powerful in the support they lend to the arguments/claims made by the author. In this chapter, I briefly sketch the theory of inscriptions and then discuss the various inscriptions mobilized in the different reports that I published based on one research study in an eighth-grade ecology curriculum.