| 1. |
- Airey, John, 1963-, et al.
(författare)
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Unpacking the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram : A Social Semiotic Analysis of the Disciplinary and Pedagogical Affordances of a Central Resource in Astronomy
- 2019
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Ingår i: Designs for Learning. - Stockholm : Stockholm University Press. - 1654-7608 .- 2001-7480. ; 11:1, s. 99-107
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this paper we are interested in the relationship between disciplinary knowledge and its representation. We carry out a social semiotic analysis of a central tool used in astronomy—the Hertzsprung-Russell (H-R) diagram—in order to highlight its disciplinary and pedagogical affordances. The H-R diagram that we know today combines many layers of astronomical knowledge, whilst still retaining some rather quirky traces of its historical roots. Our analysis shows how these ‘layers of knowledge’ and ‘historical anomalies’ have resulted in a number of counterintuitive aspects within the diagram that have successively lowered its pedagogical affordance. We claim that these counterintuitive aspects give rise to potential barriers to student disciplinary learning. Using our analysis as a case study, we generalise our findings, suggesting four types of barrier to understanding that are potentially at work when students meet disciplinary-specific semiotic resources for the first time. We finish the paper by making some general suggestions about the wider use of our analysis method and ways of dealing with any barriers to learning identified. In the specific case of the H-R diagram, we suggest that lecturers should explicitly tease out its disciplinary affordances by the use of ‘unpacked’ resources that have a higher pedagogical affordance.
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| 2. |
- Eriksson, Urban
(författare)
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The Spiral of Teaching and Learning in Physics and Astronomy
- 2016
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- When students start to learn physics and astronomy, they immediately are confronted with a multitude of representations packed with disciplinary information. This information is embedded in these representations and the students need to learn to discern the relevant information. This is not straightforward, and requires a lot of teaching and practice before being mastered. It carries many similarities to learning a new language – the language of physics, astronomy, or other sciences. However, it all starts with disciplinary discernment from those representations, something that has been shown to be challenging for students. Often the teacher who knows the representations and their appresented meaning—their disciplinary affordances—assumes that the students discern the same things in those representations as the teacher does. Research has shown that this is not the case and such assumptions leads to educational problems for the students and make learning physics or astronomy unnecessary difficult, or even inaccessible to the students. The students need be given the opportunity to develop their competency in discerning disciplinary-specific relevant aspects from representations; a competency referred to as Reading the Sky in an astronomy context, and described by the Anatomy of Disciplinary Discernment (Eriksson, 2014a; Eriksson et al., 2014b). Furthermore, physics and astronomy are subjects aiming to describe the real multidimensional world, hence involve a substantial amount of spatial thinking. The students need to learn to extrapolate three-dimensionality in their minds from two-dimensional representations, which have been shown to be challenging to students. Unfortunately, this competency is often taken for granted and rarely addressed in teaching (Eriksson et al., 2014c). In this talk we present a model in which we identify and describe the critical competencies needed to “read” disciplinary-specific representations; it concerns not only disciplinary discernment but also spatial thinking and disciplinary knowledge. These are combined into the Spiral of Teaching and Learning (STL), a new and powerful model for optimizing teaching and learning science (Eriksson, 2014a; Eriksson, 2015). We discuss consequences and possibilities when applying the STL model and give an example of how this model can be used in teaching and learning astronomy.
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| 3. |
- Linder, Cedric, et al.
(författare)
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The overlooked challenge of learning to extrapolate three-dimensionality
- 2013
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Ingår i: Book of Abstracts. - : Charles University.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Learning astronomy has many learning challenges due to the highly diverse, conceptual, and theoretical thinking used in the discipline. One taken for granted challenge is the learning to extrapolate three-dimensionality. Although we have the ability to see our surroundings in threedimensional terms, beyond a distance of about 200m this ability quickly becomes very limited. So, when looking up at the night sky, learning to discern critical features that are embedded in dimensionality does not come easily. There have been several articles addressing how fruitful 3D simulations are for astronomy education, but they do not address what students discern, nor the nature of that discernment. Taking the concept of discernment to be about noticing something and assigning meaning to it, our research question is: In terms of dimensionality, what do astronomy/physics students and professors discern when engaging with a simulated video flythrough of our Galaxy and beyond?A web-based questionnaire was designed using links to video clips drawn from a well-regarded simulation-video of travel through our galaxy and beyond. 137 physics and astronomy university students and teaching professors, who were drawn from nine countries, completed the questionnaire. The descriptions provided by them were used to formulate six categories of discernment in relation to multidimensionality. These results are used to make the case that astronomy learning that aims at developing the ability to extrapolate three-dimensionality needs to be grounded in the creation of meaningful motion parallax experiences. Teaching and learning implications are discussed.
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| 4. |
- Airey, John, 1963-, et al.
(författare)
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On the Disciplinary Affordances of Semiotic Resources
- 2014
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Ingår i: Book of Abstracts. ; , s. 54-55, s. 54-55
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- In the late 70’s Gibson (1979) introduced the concept of affordance. Initially framed around the needs of an organism in its environment, over the years the term has been appropriated and debated at length by a number of researchers in various fields. Most famous, perhaps is the disagreement between Gibson and Norman (1988) about whether affordances are inherent properties of objects or are only present when they are perceived by an organism. More recently, affordance has been drawn on in the educational arena, particularly with respect to multimodality (see Linder (2013) for a recent example). Here, Kress et al. (2001) have claimed that different modes have different specialized affordances. Then, building on this idea, Airey and Linder (2009) suggested that there is a critical constellation of modes that students need to achieve fluency in before they can experience a concept in an appropriate disciplinary manner. Later, Airey (2009) nuanced this claim, shifting the focus from the modes themselves to a critical constellation of semiotic resources, thus acknowledging that different semiotic resources within a mode often have different affordances (e.g. two or more diagrams may form the critical constellation).In this theoretical paper the concept of disciplinary affordance (Fredlund et al., 2012) is suggested as a useful analytical tool for use in education. The concept makes a radical break with the views of both Gibson and Norman in that rather than focusing on the discernment of one individual, it refers to the disciplinary community as a whole. Put simply, the disciplinary affordances of a given semiotic resource are determined by those functions that the resource is expected to fulfil by the disciplinary community. Disciplinary affordances have thus been negotiated and developed within the discipline over time. As such, the question of whether these affordances are inherent or discerned becomes moot. Rather, from an educational perspective the issue is whether the meaning that a semiotic resource affords to an individual matches the disciplinary affordance assigned by the community. The power of the term for educational work is that learning can now be framed as coming to discern the disciplinary affordances of semiotic resources.In this paper we will briefly discuss the history of the term affordance, define the term disciplinary affordance and illustrate its usefulness in a number of educational settings.
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| 5. |
- Airey, John, 1963-, et al.
(författare)
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What do you see here? : Using an analysis of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram in astronomy to create a survey of disciplinary discernment.
- 2014
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Ingår i: The first Conference of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics, Lund, Sweden, 25-27 Sept 2014. ; , s. 52-53
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Becoming part of a discipline involves learning to interpret and use a range of disciplinary-specific semiotic resources (Airey, 2009). These resources have been developed and assigned particular specialist meanings over time. Nowhere is this truer than in the sciences, where it is the norm that disciplinary-specific representations have been introduced and then refined by a number of different actors in order to reconcile them with subsequent empirical and theoretical advances. As a consequence, many of the semiotic resources used in the sciences today still retain some (potentially confusing) traces of their historical roots. However, it has been repeatedly shown that university lecturers underestimate the challenges such disciplinary specific semiotic resources may present to undergraduates (Northedge, 2002; Tobias, 1986).In this paper we analyse one such disciplinary-specific semiotic resource from the field of Astronomy—the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. First, we audit the potential of this semiotic resource to provide access to disciplinary knowledge—what Fredlund et al (2012) have termed its disciplinary affordances. Our analysis includes consideration of the use of scales, labels, symbols, sizes and colour. We show how, for historical reasons, the use of these aspects in the resource may differ from what might be expected by a newcomer to the discipline. Using the results of our analysis we then created an online questionnaire to probe what is discerned (Eriksson, Linder, Airey, & Redfors, in press) with respect to each of these aspects by astronomers and physicists ranging from first year undergraduates to university professors.Our findings suggest that some of the issues we highlight in our analysis may, in fact, be contributors to the alternative conceptions of undergraduate students and we therefore propose that lecturers pay particular attention to the disambiguation of these features for their students.
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| 6. |
- Eriksson, Moa, et al.
(författare)
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Towards understanding learning challenges involving sign conventions in introductory level kinematics
- 2018
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Ingår i: Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings. - 1539-9028. ; 2018
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Coming to appropriately appreciate the meaning of algebraic signs is an important aspect in introductory kinematics. However, in this educational context, the “disciplinary relevant aspects” of algebraic signs across vector and scalar representations are extremely difficult to discern. Our study explores the “relevance structure” that one-dimensional kinematics problems evoked for introductory level university physics students across two very different educational systems which have, in PER terms, progressive teaching environments: Sweden (n=60) and South Africa (n=24). The outcomes of two previous PER studies are used to provide the analytic basis for formulating categories of relevance structure. Aspects of a contemporary PER-developed social semiotics perspective (referred to here in terms of communication practices) are used to discuss implications for teaching in the given educational context of introductory kinematics.
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| 7. |
- Eriksson, Urban, et al.
(författare)
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Up and down, light and heavy, fast and slow : but where?
- 2019
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Ingår i: Physics Education. - : IOP Publishing Ltd.. - 0031-9120 .- 1361-6552. ; 54:2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Vertical amusement rides let your body experience the tickling sensation of feeling light, but also feeling much heavier than as usual, due to velocity changes as you move up and down. Family rides offer different possibilities to visualize the forces that are experienced by your accelerating body. This paper presents a number of different ways to view and experience the motion in a small vertical amusement ride. A smartphone includes an accelerometer that can provide a graph of the forces acting during the ride. A movie from the smartphone camera lets students recall the motion which can then be analysed in more detail. The complementary representations may help students develop a deeper understanding of the relation between force and motion. The affordances of these different semiotic resources are analysed in some detail. In addition, we discuss responses from a number of students to questions about where you feel light and where you feel heavy. We find that the experience of the body is an underused resource in physics teaching.
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| 8. |
- Eriksson, Urban, et al.
(författare)
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Watching the sky : new realizations, new meanings, and surprizing aspects in university level astronomy
- 2011
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Ingår i: E-Book Proceedings of the ESERA 2011 Conference. - Lyon, France : European Science Education Research Association. - 9789963700448 ; , s. 57-63, s. 57-63
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Learning astronomy is challenging at all levels due to the highly specialized form of communication used to share knowledge. When taking astronomy courses at different levels at university, learners are exposed to a variety of representations that are intended to help them learn about the structure and complexity of the Universe. However, not much is known about the reflective awareness that these representations evoke. Using a simulation video that provides a vivid virtual journey through our Milky Way galaxy, the nature of this awareness is captured and categorised for an array of learners (benchmark by results obtained for experts). The results illustrate how the number and nature of new things grounded in dimensionality, scale, time and perspective reflective awareness can too easily be taken for granted by both teachers and learners.
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| 9. |
- Holmström, Simon, et al.
(författare)
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Gymnasiets laborationsundervisning i fysik : mellan tradition och ändrade styrdokument
- 2018
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Ingår i: LUMAT Luonnontieteiden, matematiikan ja teknologian opetuksen tutkimus ja käytäntö. - 2323-7104. ; 6:1, s. 1-19
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Laborationer har lång tradition i fysikundervisningen och det finns många klassiska skolexperiment. Samtidigt påverkas laborationsundervisningen av reformer och teknikutveckling. I denna studie fick lärare på tre gymnasieskolor diskutera sin laborationsundervisning. Analysen baseras på händelselogik, där handling ses som intentionell och styrs av determinanterna: målsättning, förmåga, plikt och möjligheter. Studien ger insikt i hur olika faktorer påverkar lärares laborationsundervisning, och hur klassiska laborationer i fysikundervisningen både kan ha en given plats och utmanas av nya förutsättningar. Resultaten antyder att praxis och tradition är starkare påverkansfaktorer än styrdokument i lärares utformning av laborationsundervisningen, vilket delvis kan relateras till en avsaknad av fortbildning.
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| 10. |
- Holmström, Simon, et al.
(författare)
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Gymnasiets laborationsundervisning i fysik – Vad påverkar lärares val av laborationer?
- 2019
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Ingår i: LUMAT: International Journal on Math, Science and Technology Education. - 2323-7112. ; 7:1, s. 27-58
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- What factors influence Swedish upper secondary teachers' laboratory teaching in physics? This is an issue raised by the curriculum reform of 2011 in Sweden. In this study, 17 teachers at four different upper secondary schools discussed their laboratory teaching in focus group interviews. Based on an analysis of these interviews, a supplementary survey of 66 teachers was conducted. Logic of events was used as an analytical tool to understand how different factors influence teachers' teaching. The results from the focus groups indicate that teachers appreciate laboratory work that 1) are based on simple equipment, 2) provide good values of constants, 3) laboratory exercises that the students like. In the survey, the syllabus emerged as a stronger factor of influence than in the focus groups – but, the results from both parts indicate that other factors than the syllabus play a larger role for teachers' choice and layout of laboratory work.
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