Research project Transformations of transformations - an interdisciplinary study of students' meaning-making
This project is trying to gain a deeper understanding in how students can be supported in their meaning-making when they learn about scientific phenomena, such as power and counterforce. How can students, based on their everyday experiences, gain knowledge about this in a way that makes sense?
Project description
The project Transformations of transformations - an interdisciplinary study of students' meaning-making in science teaching is about gaining a deeper understanding of how students in the grades 4-6 can be supported when they learn about science subjects. In the project, we collaborate with teachers to find different ways to consciously work with the subject content to give an increased meaning and significance for scientific knowledge.
Meaning creation in science classrooms is often characterized by multimodality. This means that students and teachers communicate about the content through many different resources, such as verbal language, images and models of various kinds. In this way, the subject content can be transformed (moved and reshaped) between the different representations, in order to highlight different aspects of scientific phenomena.
Each representation, or modality, has different potential for meaning-making in the field and in the communicative situation. Therefore, several different resources are needed, to talk about and describe, different aspects of the content. For the students, it requires being able to switch and integrate between the representations used.
Previous research has shown that conversations about how content is represented are unusual, especially when it comes to modalities other than verbal language. Therefore, there is reason to develop working methods and a didactic awareness among teachers that enables them to talk to students about the potential of different representations for their meaning-making.
Project members
Project managers
Kristina Danielsson
Professor
