Students’ attitudes and beliefs about learning have been shown to affect learning outcomes. Thisstudy explores how university physics students think about what it means to understand physicsequations. The data comes from semi-structured interviews with students from three Swedish univer-sities. The analysis follows a data-based, inductive approach to characterise students’ descriptions ofwhat it means to understand equations in terms of epistemological mindsets (perceived critical attri-butes of a learning, application, or problem-solving situation that are grounded in epistemology). Theresults are given in terms of different components of students’ epistemological mindsets. Relationsbetween individuals and sets of components as well as differences across various stages of students’academic career are then explored. Pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed and tenta-tive suggestions for university physics teaching are made.
Genetics and organic chemistry are areas of science that students regard as difficult to learn. Part of this difficulty is derived from the disciplines having representations as part of their discourses. In order to optimally support students’ meaning-making, teachers need to use representations to structure the meaning-making experience in thoughtful ways that consider the variation in students’ prior know-ledge. Using a focus group setting, we explored 43 university students’ reasoning on representations in introductory chemistry and genetics courses. Our analysis of eight focus group discussions revealed how students can construct somewhat bewildered relations with disciplinary-specific representa-tions. The students stated that they preferred familiar representations, but without asserting the meaning-making affordances of those representations. Also, the students were highly aware of the affordances of certain representations, but nonetheless chose not to use those representations in their problem solving. We suggest that an effective representation is one that, to some degree, is familiar to the students, but at the same time is challenging and not too closely related to “the usual one”. The focus group discussions led the students to become more aware of their own and others ways of interpreting different representations. Furthermore, feedback from the students’ focus group discus-sions enhanced the teachers’ awareness of the students’ prior knowledge and limitations in students’ representational literacy. Consequently, we posit that a focus group setting can be used in a university context to promote both student meaning-making and teacher professional development in a fruitful way.
In Sweden, a new subject syllabus for Science Studies (Naturkunskap) in upper secondary school was introduced in 2011. In this syllabus knowledge about norms concerning sexualities and relations was brought to the fore as a core content. The aim of this paper is to explore how norms concerning sexuality guide the teaching, through a case study where three upper secondary school teachers were observed and their teaching was analysed from the perspective of companion meanings. All three observed teachers did teach about homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender identities, often using genetics or evolution as their explanatory model. The teaching most often assumed that all students in the class were heterosexual, positioning LGBT-people as the Other, and did at no times take power perspectives into account.
Science education research has long taken an interest in how we may make full use of analogies and metaphors in science teaching. Further, more recently, the role of implicit, conceptual metaphors in connecting abstract conceptual knowledge to concrete embodied experiences has been recognised. The textbook plays a central role in upper secondary teaching, as it is, together with the teacher, a source of knowledge for the students. We have analysed the use of analogies, and explicit and implicit metaphors in two Swedish upper secondary chemistry textbook, and interviewed two of the authors of the textbooks. Abstract states and processes were found to be construed by means of the Object-Event and Location-Event Structure metaphors. Explicit metaphors and analogies were presented, but the comparisons were not always elaborated sufficiently in order to guide the students’ interpretations and avoid possible misunderstandings.
How do students in a university degree programme make sense of their situation, and how can we asteachers support them in seeing their learning as a whole in relation to their main subject physics?This question is discussed first in relation to an empirical investigation of students’ ways of makingsense of their study situation, and secondly draws on experience from two attempts to address is-sues emerging from that investigation. Based on the results we identify issues that potentially needaddressing in many science and engineering programmes that are organised around a set of coursesgiven by subject specialists and where students’ choices of courses are limited. These issues primarilyconcern the authority for learning, the development of a “physics knowledge object” as a programmegoal, and the risk that students ended up only focussing on features of the courses’ organisation togive meaning to their studies. Finally, we discuss ways to support students’ sense making, as a processof learning for the “college of teachers” in such programmes.
This article presents a qualitative analysis of the essential characteristics of university students’ “focusof awareness” whilst engaged with learning physics related to the Bohr model with the aid of a com-puter simulation. The research is located within the phenomenographic research tradition, with empi-rical data comprising audio and video recordings of student discussions and interactions, supplemen-ted by interviews. Analysis of this data resulted in descriptions of four qualitatively distinct focuses:Doing the Assignment, Observing the Presentation, Manipulating the Parameters and Exploring thePhysics. The focuses are further elucidated in terms of students’ perceptions of learning and the natureof physics. It is concluded that the learning outcomes possible for the students are dependent on thefocus that is adopted in the pedagogical situation. Implications for teaching physics using interactive-type simulations can be drawn through epistemological and meta-cognitive considerations of thekind of mindful interventions appropriate to a specific focus.
In this paper we survey different teaching traditions in Swedish Science Education. The purpose is to map and investigate patterns in teachers’ views of what constitutes “good” Science education in the middle years of compulsory school in Sweden. This is done with the background of a new curriculum with national testing and grading being introduced, which could potentially alter teachers’ views of what is relevant content. A web-based questionnaire to teachers all throughout Sweden (response rate 43%, N=796) was used. The results show that groups can be formed with teachers emphasizing different teaching objectives including emphasis on; scientific facts and concept, laboratory work, everyday knowledge, and political and moral questions, even though the groups had a lot of similarities. The teachers indicate that they changed their instruction to a considerable extent after the three parallel reforms carried out 2011-13.
This study investigates undergraduate students’ ability to use the ideas of measurement and uncertainty to process and compare experimental data. These ideas include not only knowing what it means to use an instrument to take a measurement, but also being able to apply that knowledge, including the ideas that make up uncertainty analysis, to every aspect of an experiment. A physics laboratory course for the Energy Systems Engineering programme at Uppsala University has been designed to focus on teaching students the ideas of measurement and the associated laboratory skills. In the reported study, we use an open-ended survey to investigate students’ ideas about data processing and data comparison before and after this laboratory course. The results show that several students, even after the course, are still unable to appropriately use the ideas of uncertainty. This suggests that these ideas must be continuously revisited and explored as a fundamental part of all undergraduate laboratory experiences.
The release of major reforms makes teachers reconsider how they teach. In Sweden, a new curriculum along with grading and national tests were introduced in Year 6 science education in 2012/2013. After two years the national tests were made voluntary and ended the following year. We will investigate what implications these reforms had for teachers’ teaching and assessment practices in science education. Interviews with 10 teachers over four subsequent years were analyzed in order to explore how teachers coordinate their teaching habits in the encounter with new policy. First it was striking that almost all the teachers accepted the reforms as a positive element in their professional work. In the last round of interviews it was evident that the teachers, after the tests were taken away, downplayed the significance of the national tests as something that changed their teaching and changed what they consider as good science education.
This study examines differences in language use in different scientific subjects by analysing all grade 8 science items from TIMSS 2011. Four meaning dimensions are identified as central for analysing what functions different linguistic features fulfil in scientific language. They concern the levels of Packing, Precision and Presentation of information, and the level of Personification in a text.
The results show that language use in TIMSS differs in some ways among the scientific subjects. Average physics language uses more words. Language use in biology shows higher Packing and lower Precision, while physics shows the opposite pattern. Although items are generally low in Personification, the language of physics has higher levels of Personification, especially compared to earth science. Language in chemistry often presents information in more complex ways. According to these results, the study appears to challenge the notion that there is a single scientific language.