THE DEVELOPMENT OF REPRESENTATIONAL COMPETENCE

Author(s):  
William J. Meyer
Author(s):  
Maia Popova ◽  
Tamera Jones

Representational competence is one's ability to use disciplinary representations for learning, communicating, and problem-solving. These skills are at the heart of engagement in scientific practices and were recognized by the ACS Examinations Institute as one of ten anchoring concepts. Despite the important role that representational competence plays in student success in chemistry and the considerable number of investigations into students’ ability to reason with representations, very few studies have examined chemistry instructors’ approaches toward developing student representational competence. This study interviewed thirteen chemistry instructors from eleven different universities across the US about their intentions to develop, teach, and assess student representational competence skills. We found that most instructors do not aim to help students develop any representational competence skills. At the same time, participants’ descriptions of their instructional and assessment practices revealed that, without realizing it, most are likely to teach and assess several representational competence skills in their courses. A closer examination of these skills revealed a focus on lower-level representational competence skills (e.g., the ability to interpret and generate representations) and a lack of a focus on higher-level meta-representational competence skills (e.g., the ability to describe affordances and limitations of representations). Finally, some instructors reported self-awareness about their lack of knowledge about effective teaching about representations and the majority expressed a desire for professional development opportunities to learn about differences in how experts and novices conceptualize representations, about evidence-based practices for teaching about representations, and about how to assess student mastery of representational competence skills. This study holds clear implications for informing chemistry instructors’ professional development initiatives. Such training needs to help instructors take cognizance of relevant theories of learning (e.g., constructivism, dual-coding theory, information processing model, Johnstone's triangle), and the key factors affecting students’ ability to reason with representations, as well as foster awareness of representational competence skills and how to support students in learning with representations.


Author(s):  
Lorena Solvang ◽  
Jesper Haglund

AbstractThe present study contributes to the understanding of physics students’ representational competence by examining specific bodily practices (e.g. gestures, enactment) of students’ interaction and constructions of representations in relation to a digital learning environment. We present and analyse video data of upper-secondary school students’ interaction with a GeoGebra simulation of friction. Our analysis is based on the assumption that, in a collaborative learning environment, students use their bodies as means of dealing with interpretational problems, and that exploring students’ gestures and enactment can be used to analyse their sensemaking processes. This study shows that specific features of the simulation—features connected with microscopic aspects of friction—triggered students to ask what-if and why questions and consequently, to learn about the representation. During this sense-making process, students improvised their own representations to make their ideas more explicit. The findings extend current research on students’ representational competence by bringing attention to the role of students’ generation of improvised representations in the processes of learning with and about representations.


1980 ◽  
Vol 1980 (2) ◽  
pp. i-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irving E. Sigel ◽  
Ann V. McGillicuddy-De Lisi ◽  
James E. Johnson

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 924-936 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Graulich ◽  
Sebastian Hedtrich ◽  
René Harzenetter

Learning to interpret organic structures not as an arrangement of lines and letters but, rather, as a representation of chemical entities is a challenge in organic chemistry. To successfully deal with the variety of molecules or mechanistic representations, a learner needs to understand how a representation depicts domain-specific information. Various studies that focused on representational competence have already investigated how learners relate a representation to its corresponding concept. However, aside from a basic connectional representational understanding, the ability to infer a comparable reactivity from multiple different functional groups in large molecules is important for undergraduate students in organic chemistry. In this quantitative study, we aimed at exploring how to assess undergraduate students’ ability to distinguish between conceptually relevant similarities and distracting surface similarities among representations. The instrument consisted of multiple-choice items in four concept categories that are generally used to estimate the reactivity in substitution reactions. This exploratory study shows that the item design for assessing students’ conceptual understanding influences students’ answering patterns. Insights and pitfalls gained from this investigation and future directions for research and teaching are provided.


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