RUC

IMFUFA seminar: Michael May (Institut for naturfagenes didaktik, KU)

Af: Dorthe Møller Vedel

Programmet opdateres løbende på www.ruc.dk/institutter/institut-for-natur-systemer-og-modeller-nsm/arrangementer/seminarer/imfufa-seminar/

Student’s graph and model comprehension problems in science and engineering education: Semiotic perspectives
A long-term interest of mine is the development of a semiotics of modeling in science and engineering education. Semiotics is the study of meaning and signification from the point of view of a signs and sign systems. This is a broad and complex issue and I will say something about what a “semiotics of modeling” might be at the end of my talk, but I will mainly focus on a particular subset of conceptual problems that appear across different domains of university science education and which seem to be related to “graph comprehension”. I will start by presenting a number of concrete examples of “misconceptions” (from conceptual tests and/or interviews with students) and then provide some hypothetical explanations for why these problems occur. Teachers in science and engineering often complain about student’s mathematical competences, but one of the difficult issues that we might take up in discussion is how to entangle mathematical competence problems from disciplinary conceptual problems in understanding the underlying concepts and models. Graphs interpreted by or produced by students gives access to these problems, and we should discuss what didactic consequences we might draw from considering such recurrent problems of graph- and model-comprehension.