Designing representations of terrain: a study in meta-representational competence

Abstract

I investigate students' ability to design and refine representations of model and real landscapes. Two premises lie behind this line of work. First, the creation and the use of representations are prominent activities in professional scientific practice. Thus, having students become proficient designers of representations appears to be a worthy goal. Second, students seem to possess a great deal of knowledge regarding ways of representing aspects of the world on paper, and such knowledge can be profitably used in learning canonical ways of representing landscapes. I pursue several parallel lines of analysis. First, I survey the representational forms students generate when engaged in open-ended design activities in which they are asked to create representations of terrain. Based on a categorization of students' works, I then present a preliminary identification of the knowledge implicated in the creation of such representational forms. We call this prior knowledge constructive resources. I describe two broad classes of constructive resources: drawing and the use of colors for representational purposes. In addition to constructive resources, I also preliminarily address students' use of criteria for judging the adequacy of their designs. Together with constructive resources, design criteria are main elements shaping students' performance in the proposed tasks. Finally, as a way to suggest paths that students could take towards more normative forms of representing terrain, I identify continuities between students' spontaneous representational practices and those of standard scientific practices.