Abstract
ABSTRACT A social semiotic lens is used to characterise aspects of representational competence for a discipline such as physics, to provide science teachers with a practical suggestion about how student learning might be organised to develop representational competence. We suggest that representational competence for some areas of science can be characterised in terms of the ability to appropriately interpret and produce a set of disciplinary-scientific representations of real-world phenomena, and link these to scientific concepts. This is because many areas of science are based on creating scientific explanations of real-world observations. We then show how this characterisation may be applied by performing a social semiotic audit of what it entails to become representationally competent in one particular semiotic system (graphs) for one particular area of physics (1-D kinematics). Using this audit, we generate three open-ended tasks expected to help students develop representational competence in this area and empirically demonstrate their potential effectiveness. Building on this example, we suggest that our description of how a disciplinary social semiotic audit may be used to construct open-ended student learning tasks potentially provides one way for teachers to think about the development of representational competence in other semiotic systems and other areas of science.
Highlights
In this paper, we take a social semiotic approach to the teaching and learning of undergraduate physics
In this paper we adopted a social semiotic lens to suggest a characterisation of representational competence that may be used in some areas of science: Representational competence (R) is the ability to appropriately interpret and produce a set of disciplinary-accepted representations of real-world phenomena and link these to formalised scientific concepts
We set out to illustrate the usefulness of this characterisation of representational competence by applying it to a particular area of physics (1-D kinematics)
Summary
We take a social semiotic approach to the teaching and learning of undergraduate physics. Returning to our visualisation of representational competence, we can apply the results of our semiotic audit to create a specific triangle for representational competence in graphs (RGRAPH) for 1-D kinematics which involves interpreting and producing three types of graph that need to be appropriately associated with both kinematic concepts and real-world motion (Figure 4). In the particular area of graphs (RGRAPH) for 1-D kinematics, our semiotic audit suggests the different meaning-making possibilities of the three graphs (position/ time, velocity/time, and acceleration/time) need to be linked to real-world motion and kinematics concepts. Note that following our semiotic audit, these tasks can only begin to develop students’ representational competence This is because there are 48 possible generic meaning-making shapes (plus the extra meaning making possibilities that crossing the axes entail) across three graphs that students need to appropriately coordinate and associate with real-world and physics concepts. Particular attention was paid to the coordination of actions and speech around the graph information
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