Making the invisible visible: The role of representations in teaching and learning university physics and chemistry.

Research into discipline-based education (ämnesdidaktik på högskolenivå) has traditionally been an underprioritised area in Sweden.

University lecturers are provided with 15 credits of general pedagogy for higher education, but receive no training in how to teach specific disciplinary content.

We argue that the need for discipline-specific educational research is particularly acute in the natural sciences, since many of the phenomena described such as radioactivity, x-rays, quantum effects, etc. are hidden from the human senses.

Students can only experience such phenomena through coordination of discipline-specific resources such as graphs, diagrams, language, mathematics, symbols, etc.

In this project we have chosen to investigate two areas that are known to cause problems for undergraduate students, namely electromagnetic fields and chemical bonding.

We begin by auditing the range of representations made available to students in the two areas through their  textbooks. Thereafter we interview lecturers about the disciplinary function of these representations.

We then video undergraduate lectures, using parts of the video to interview students in a process of stimulated recall to ascertain what aspects of representations students fail to notice or misinterpret. Multimodal analysis of this work will lead to a theoretical proposal about how such problems may be addressed.

In the final part of the project we empirically test our theoretical proposal in two undergraduate courses.