ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Multimodality of Communication
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1603737
A Hierarchical Typology of Multimodal Scientific Writing in Early Primary Grades
Provisionally accepted
- 1Purdue University, West Lafayette, United States
- 2The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, United States
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Scientific literacy in early education depends on both content knowledge and young learners' ability to organize and express scientific ideas across linguistic and visual-graphical modes. This study examined how children in kindergarten through 2nd grade develop multimodal competency, or the capacity to coordinate text structure, linguistic and visual-graphical modes, and content, as a foundation for scientific meaning-making. A quantitative content analysis was conducted on 1,705 science writing samples from 1,008 students (kindergarten through 2nd grade), each coded for structural, modal, and conceptual features. Latent class analysis identified six typologies of multimodal composition, ranging from simple unlabeled visual texts to strategically integrated complementary compositions. These typologies reflect a developmental continuum of representational strategies, influenced by students’ emerging metacognitive awareness, selective integration of information, and understanding of the affordances of different modes. Findings suggest that young children’s multimodal texts function as both communication and epistemic tools that support knowledge construction, with implications for instructional design in early science education.
Keywords: multimodal writing, Primary science education, young learners, Scientific text production, linguistic and visual-graphical modes, epistemic tools, generative learning, metacognition
Received: 31 Mar 2025; Accepted: 24 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Nichols, Neal and Hand. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: DEBORAH L Nichols, Purdue University, West Lafayette, United States
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