| 1. |
- Bohlin, Gustav, 1981-
(författare)
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Evolving germs – Antibiotic resistance and natural selection in education and public communication
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Bacterial resistance to antibiotics threatens modern healthcare on a global scale. Several actors in society, including the general public, must become more involved if this development is to be countered. The conveyance of relevant information provided through education and media reports is therefore of high concern. Antibiotic resistance evolves through the mechanisms of natural selection; in this way, a sound understanding of these mechanisms underlies explanations of causes and the development of effective risk-reduction measures. In addition to natural selection functioning as an explanatory framework to antibiotic resistance, bacterial resistance as a context seems to possess a number of qualities that make it suitable for teaching natural selection – a subject that has been proven notoriously hard to teach and learn. A recently suggested approach for learning natural selection involves so-called threshold concepts, which encompass abstract and integrative ideas. The threshold concepts associated with natural selection include, among others, the notions of randomness as well as vast spatial and temporal scales. Illustrating complex relationships between concepts on different levels of organization is one, of several, areas where visualizations are efficient. Given the often-imperceptible nature of threshold concepts as well as the fact that natural selection processes occur on different organizational levels, visual accounts of natural selection have many potential benefits for learning.Against this background, the present dissertation explores information conveyed to the public regarding antibiotic resistance and natural selection, as well as investigates how these topics are presented together, by scrutinizing media including news reports, websites, educational textbooks and online videos. The principal method employed in the media studies was content analysis, which was complemented with various other analytical procedures. Moreover, a classroom study was performed, in which novice pupils worked with a series of animations explaining the evolution of antibiotic resistance. Data from individual written assignments, group questions and video-recorded discussions were collected and analyzed to empirically explore the potential of antibiotic resistance as a context for learning about evolution through natural selection.Among the findings are that certain information, that is crucial for the public to know, about antibiotic resistance was conveyed to a low extent through wide-reaching news reporting. Moreover, explanations based on natural selection were rarely included in accounts of antibiotic resistance in any of the examined media. Thus, it is highly likely that a large proportion of the population is never exposed to explanations for resistance development during education or through newspapers. Furthermore, the few examples that were encountered in newspapers or textbooks were hardly ever visualized, but presented only in textual form. With regard to videos purporting to explain natural selection, it was found that a majority lacked accounts of central key concepts. Additionally, explanations of how variation originates on the DNA-level were especially scarce. These and other findings coming from the content analyses are discussed through the lens of scientific literacy and could be used to inform and strengthen teaching and scientific curricula with regards to both antibiotic resistance and evolution. Furthermore, several factors of interest for using antibiotic resistance in the teaching of evolution were identified from the classroom study. These involve, among others, how learners’ perception of threshold concepts such as randomness and levels of organization in space and time are affected by the bacterial context
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| 2. |
- Gunnarsson, Gunilla, 1961-
(författare)
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Den laborativa klassrumsverksamhetens interaktioner : En studie om vilket meningsskapande år 7-elever kan erbjudas i möten med den laborativa verksamhetens instruktioner, artefakter och språk inom elementär ellära, samt om lärares didaktiska handlingsmönster i dessa möten.
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis studies students’ encounters with school science language games within the framework of laboratory classroom activities in Elementary Electricity. The focus is on students’ interaction with the teacher and with other students as well as with artefacts. The aim is to describe ongoing activities and instructions as well as student focusing in relation to the teacher’s aims and also to elucidate the interactions appearing in students’ encounters with a new language game in the form of new artefacts and new language usage, as well as the way the teacher can assist the students in their learning process during these encounters. Three student groups from the Swedish comprehensive school year 7 and their teachers have been studied by observation in situ. The gathering of data has been done via field notes and video recordings made during approximately three weeks per group. One of the teachers was interviewed about the aims of the laboratory sessions. Classroom interactions in the form of talk and action have been analyzed as qualitative data. The result shows that the aim of the laboratory sessions as expressed by the teacher in the interview – what the students were expected to learn from the various laboratory sessions – remained implicit to the students. Explicit to them, were, however, the descriptions in the laboratory instructions – the doing that was supposed to take place. The students followed the instructions very carefully which made them focus primarily on what should be done and how this should be presented. From the instruction can be seen that the students are supposed to learn inductively. In other words, by doing and observing they are supposed to understand why the result turns out the way it does. The lab instruction can be viewed as an interaction affordance by which the students act, which gives the instruction a great impact on what students focus on and actually learn. The study looks upon the laboratory equipment, i.e., the artefacts, as participants in the activity. The artefacts are theory-dependent, offering several different interaction affordances, depending both on their design and on the students’ earlier experiences. This means that the interaction with artefacts creates learning differences for different students in different situations. It turns out that artefacts mediate in a more channelled and correct manner in the school science language game when students cooperate or obtain support from a more experienced person (student or teacher). Cooperation and talk, in other words, benefit the desired learning. The choice of artefacts together with their design has an impact on what students make meaning about. The encounter with scientific language usage and everyday language often leads to so-called language game clashes, the result of which may be that distracting gaps in the communication are noticed by one of the parties involved. These gaps may then distract students in their continued learning unless they are filled. Terms that are well know to students in the everyday language game but which obtain another meaning in the new scientific language game may, since the discrepancy is unclear to the student, be viewed as gaps unnoticed so far. In the thesis these gaps are interpreted as a lack of experience in a specific situation or even as a lack of support from a person who is more experienced in the situation; i.e., they are not looked upon as static misconceptions. Teacher support is required in various ways in student encounters with the school science language game. Teacher aid may either be described as indirect, when the teacher helps students to notice problems or gaps, i.e., desirable gaps in the situation, or as direct, when the teacher helps them to solve the problems they have noticed and thus to fill the gap with relevant relations. What is described is, in other words, the action pattern as an expression of the teacher’s didaktik finger-tip sensitivity or as part of the teacher’s Pedagogical Content Knowledge, PCK, or Pedagogical Context Knowledge, PCxK. Work with the analysis has developed the analysis method further. This had led to new analysis concepts (desirable gaps, distracting gaps, so far unnoticed gaps) for analyzing classroom talk, which may be regarded as a contribution to method development but also as a possibility to develop professional teacher language. The analysis concepts may, for example, be applied by teachers in didaktik self-analysis and in studies of didaktik action patterns among teachers as well as among peers.
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| 3. |
- Sidenvall, Johan, 1974-
(författare)
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Att lära sig resonera : om elevers möjligheter att lära sig matematiska resonemang
- 2015
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Students only learn what they get the opportunity to learn. This means, for example, that students do not develop their reasoning- and problem solving competence unless teaching especially focuses on developing these competencies. Despite the fact that it has for the last 20 years been pointed out the need for a reform-oriented mathematics education, research still shows that in Sweden, as well as internationally, an over-emphasis are placed on rote learning and procedures, at the cost of promoting conceptual understanding. Mathematical understanding can be separated into procedural and conceptual understanding, where conceptual understanding can be connected to a reform oriented mathematics education. By developing a reasoning competence conceptual understanding can also be developed. This thesis, which deals with students’ opportunities to learn to reason mathematically, includes three studies (with data from Swedish upper secondary school, year ten and mathematics textbooks from twelve countries). These opportunities have been studied based on a textbook analysis and by studying students' work with textbook tasks during normal classroom work. Students’ opportunities to learn to reason mathematically have also been studied by examining the relationship between students' reasoning and their beliefs. An analytical framework (Lithner, 2008) has been used to categorise and analyse reasoning used in solving tasks and required to solve tasks.Results support previous research in that teaching and mathematics textbooks are not necessarily in harmony with reform-oriented mathematics teaching. And that students indicated beliefs of insecurity, personal- and subject expectations as well as intrinsic- and extrinsic motivation connects to not using mathematical reasoning when solving non-routine tasks. Most commonly students used other strategies than mathematical reasoning when solving textbook tasks. One common way to solve tasks was to be guided, in particular by another student. The results also showed that the students primarily worked with the simpler tasks in the textbook. These simpler tasks required mathematical reasoning more rarely than the more difficult tasks. The results also showed a negative relationship between a belief of insecurity and the use of mathematical reasoning. Furthermore, the results show that the distributions of tasks that require mathematical reasoning are relatively similar in the examined textbooks across five continents.Based on the results it is argued for a teaching based on sociomathematical norms that leads to an inquiry based teaching and textbooks that are more in harmony with a reform-oriented mathematics education.
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| 4. |
- Stadig Degerman, Mari
(författare)
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Att hantera cellmetabolismens komplexitet : Meningsskapande genom visualisering och metaforer
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Den molekylära livsvetenskapen är ett av de mest snabbväxande fälten inom naturvetenskap. Biokemi är en aktör inom detta tvärvetenskapliga fält, tillsammans med bland annat cellbiologi och genetik. En konsekvens är att läroböckerna ständigt sväller i omfång. Ett exempel är den välkända läroboken ”Molecular biology of the cell” av Bruce Alberts och medarbetare, som sedan sin första upplaga 1983 till den senaste reviderade femte upplagan ökat från cirka 1000 till 1600 sidor, en ökning på cirka 60%. Samtidigt har olika typer av representationer av de molekylära livsprocesserna ökat i betydelse såväl för forskning som för undervisning, och både den ökade kunskapen och utvecklingen inom visualiseringstekniken har gett nya möjligheter till att illustrera detta komplexa område.Cellmetabolismen utgör en central del av den molekylära livsvetenskapen och består av ett närmast ofattbart antal reaktioner som sker samtidigt i cellen. Representationer (både interna och externa) spelar en central roll i kommunikationen av detta komplexa område och valet av symboler och metaforer påverkar tolkningen av dessa. De kan underlätta förståelsen men även misstolkas och därigenom skapa fallgropar för studenter. ”Makrofiering” av processen påverkar därmed studenters meningsskapande. Denna ämnesdidaktiska avhandling avser att bidra till en ökad medvetenhet bland lärare om; 1) vilka lärandemål som kräver särskild omsorg i undervisning av cellmetabolismen samt 2) betydelsen av det visuella språket i exempelvis animationer för hur metabola processer tolkas och förstås.Man kan beskriva min avhandling som ett strategiskt arbete som startade med att jag ringade in vilka lärandemål som undervisande universitetslärare anser vara viktiga inom ett av cellbiologins och biokemins centrala områden, cellmetabolismen. Därefter fortsatte arbetet med en insnävning mot en speciell metabolisk process (ATP-syntes i den oxidativa forsforyleringen), och därefter till att kartlägga tolkningar av en specifik animation av ATP-syntas. Det som genomgående jämförs är lärarnas respektive animatörens intentioner och studenternas förståelse och tolkningar. Både konceptuell förståelse och hur ett metaforiskt/symboliskt språk kan skapa olika tolkningar av en molekylär process. Vilka meddelanden når studenterna? Hur förstår de lärarnas mål med undervisningen och animatörens sätt att förmedla processen i animationen? Vad underlättar respektive försvårar kommunikationen?
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| 5. |
- Stenlund, Jörgen, 1959-
(författare)
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Travelling through time : Students’ interpretation of evolutionary time in dynamic visualizations
- 2019
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Evolutionary knowledge is important to understand and address contemporary challenges such as loss of biodiversity, climate change and antibiotic resistance. An important aspect that is considered to be a threshold concept in teaching and learning about evolution is the time it involves. The history of evolution comprises several scales of magnitude, some of which are far from direct human experience and therefore difficult to understand. One way of addressing this issue is to use dynamic visualizations that represent time, for example, to facilitate teaching and learning about evolution.This thesis investigates how students’ comprehension of evolution and evolutionary time can be facilitated by visualizations in educational settings. Two different dynamic visualizations were investigated. In paper I different temporal versions of a spatio-temporal animation depicting hominin evolution were explored. The temporal information was expressed as one or several timelines along which an animated cursor moved, indicating the rate of time. Two variables, the number of timelines with different scales, and the mode of the default animated time rate (either constant throughout the animation or decreasing as the animation progressed), were combined to give four different time representations. The temporal aspects investigated were undergraduate students' ability to find events at specific times, comprehend order, comprehend concurrent events, comprehend the length of time intervals, and their ability to compare the lengths of time intervals.In paper II, perceptions and comprehension of temporal aspects in an interactive, multi-touch tabletop application, DeepTree, were investigated. This application depicts the tree of life. The focus was on the interactive aspects, especially how the zooming feature was perceived, but also on any misinterpretations associated with the interaction. The same temporal aspects listed for paper I were also implicitly investigated.The findings indicate that handling the problem of large differences in scale by altering the rate of time in the visualization can facilitate perception of certain temporal aspects while, at the same time, can hinder a correct comprehension of other temporal aspects. Findings concerning DeepTree indicate that the level of interactions varies among users, and that the zooming feature is perceived in two ways, either as a movement in time or as a movement in the metaphorical tree. Several misinterpretations were observed, for example the assumption that the zooming time in the tree corresponds to real time, that there is an implicit coherent timeline along the y-axis of the tree, and that more nodes along a branch corresponds to a longer time.The research reported in this thesis supports the claim that careful choice, and informed use of visualizations matters, and that different visualizations are best suited for different educational purposes
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