Qualitatively different ways of unpacking visual representations when teaching intermolecular forces in upper secondary school

Abstract

Since visual representations play a particularly important role in the teaching and learning of chemistry, the exploration described in this article focuses on them. This is an explorative study of the qualitatively different ways that visual representations can be unpacked by Swedish upper secondary school chemistry teachers dealing with intermolecular forces. Unpacking is characterized as the ways that visual representations get used to open up the possibility of having the critical aspects and features of an intended object of learning being brought into focal awareness, initially on their own and then simultaneously.The analysis, which combines a phenomenographic and a social semiotic approach, leads to the characterizations of five qualitatively different ways that visual representations may be unpacked. These outcome categories are presented in terms of a conceptual hierarchy, where two of these ways of unpacking are characterized as being teachercentered and the other three as student-centered. This leads to a case being made that if teachers use studentcentered ways of unpacking visual representations, then their students will be more likely to gain greater access to critical aspects and features of the enacted object of learning. We argue that in terms of making theoretical and This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

The Complexity of Reasoning about and with Chemical Representations

“…30,31 Investigations in this area also highlight the need for a critical analysis of teacher-centered versus student-centered instructional strategies used to guide students in the unpacking/packing of chemical representations. 28,108 Existing research in chemistry education has shown the positive effects that different types of tasks, such as comparecontrast 109 and drawing activities 13,25 as well as tasks that take advantage of adaptive technologies 110 or embodied cognition 111,112 (e.g., gestures, simulated action), have on different aspects of students' representational competency in chemistry. These investigations, however, typically do not consider how the distinctive characteristics and dimensions of different chemical representations interact with task characteristics to affect student performance.…”

MODELLING-BASED TEACHING IN CHEMISTRY IN A MULTILINGUAL CONTEXT : A tool to explore and visualise the non-spontaneous and abstract?

“…Phenomenography involves studying other people's experiences (Marton & Booth, 1997), focusing on What is experienced and How it is experienced (Marton & Booth, 1997;Patron et al, 2021;Patron, 2022). Essential in phenomenography is that a person can only experience and act according to how the person experiences the world.…”

“…Within the framework of phenomenography, learning is about experiencing aspects of the world in particular ways (Marton & Booth, 1997;Lo, 2012;Nilsson & Vikström, 2015;Pang & Marton, 2013;Patron et al, 2021;Patron, 2022). Ways of experiencing things are described as the structure of awareness, which Marton and Booth (1997) equal to structure consciousness.…”

“…Experiencing something is thus not just distinguishing it out of context but relating it to one's context and, at the same time, to other contexts. To discern, people must experience different aspects by variation (Marton & Booth, 1997;Martin & Tsui, 2004;Lo, 2012;Nilsson & Vikström, 2015;Pang & Marton, 2013;Patron et al, 2021;Patron, 2022). People are also considered carriers of different ways of experiencing phenomena (Marton & Booth, 1997).…”

“…To analyse and discuss the modelling activity, the thesis draws on a sociocultural perspective (Jordan et al, 2008;Säljö, 2015;Vygotsky, 1978;Vygotsky, 1986), a phenomenographic perspective (Marton, 2015;Marton & Booth, 1997;Marton & Tsui, 2004), and a social semiotic perspective (Bezemer & Kress, 2020;Jewitt et al, 2016;Kress & Bezemer, 2015;Kress, 2001;Leijon & Lindstrand, 2012;Lemke, 1998). The phenomenographic and social semiotics approaches have been successfully combined in chemistry education research, e.g., Patron et al (2021) and Patron (2022). The modelling process conducted by the students is referred to as semiotic work (Bezemer & Kress, 2020) and the expressed representations as mediating artefacts (Vygotsky, 1978) and semiotic resources (Kress, 2001;Lemke, 1998;Van Leeuwen, 2005).…”