OVERVIEW

In How to Solve It, a renowned book about problem solving, George Polya (1945) recommends that if you are having difficulty understanding a problem, try drawing a picture.  This strategy is the essence of a Vee Diagram.  Gowin ( originally developed the Vee Heuristic to guide science students in making explicit statements that he believed were essential to constructing new knowledge about a concept.  Heuristic are tools, methods, or procedures that help people to recognize relationships and through this process reach higher levels of understanding about complex events, objects, or phenomena.

A Vee Diagram, named because of its shape, is a visual representation of a complex phenomenon.  The diagram promotes understanding between what is observable or known and what needs to be understood.  Using a Vee Diagram begins with a focusing question and then develops along doing and thinking pathways.  Here is a description of the elements of our simplified version of a Vee Diagram:

• The focus question drives the overall investigation.
• Objects or events that occur are described at the point of the Vee.
• The right arm of the Vee is the doing side.
• Data and Records include all tables, graphs, and observations.
• Analysis is where sense is made of the data and records.
• Knowledge Claims describe an individual’s new understandings that arise from completing the task.
• The thinking component of the Vee is on the left.
• Concepts are the main ideas that are embedded in the learning activity.
• Principles are concepts that are synthesized and transformed into broader unifying statements.

IMPLEMENTING THIS ACTIVITY

Developing a level of comfort with constructing Vee Diagrams requires practice and persistence.  The best way for teachers to introduce Vee Diagram is incrementally.  For example, initially students might only be required to complete the “doing” side of the Vee and be given considerable latitude in grading of the work.   As facility using the diagram improves, students can be asked to identify the main concepts and unifying principles found on the “thinking” side.

The best way to develop a Vee Diagram is to begin with the events at the point of the Vee followed by the focus or research question(s). The reason for such a progression is that events help to determining the focusing question.  This is what eventually drives the learning experience and the subsequent interactions between the doing and thinking sides of the Vee.
Providing the following guiding questions can help students to successfully use Vee Diagrams to generate new knowledge.

1. What do I want to find out about?
2. What methods or approaches did I use to investigate the topic or question/
3. What are the objects and/or events that I observed or measured?
4. What data/record or transformations accurately represent what I observed?
5. What relevant concepts or principles were directly mentioned or implied?
6. What new findings did I make that were not present at the onset of the activity?

(Adapted from: Novak & Gowin, 1984, p. 73)

CONTENT AREA APPLICATIONS

• This procedure can be used in any discipline. Among the uses that have been made of Vee Diagrams are:
  
  To keep records of an event that was investigated.
• To plan and complete a research project.
• To analyze an article.
• To make sense from data generated during an investigation.