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Full-Text Articles in Education
Misconstruals Or More? The Interactions Of Orbit Diagrams And Explanations Of The Seasons, Victor R. Lee
Misconstruals Or More? The Interactions Of Orbit Diagrams And Explanations Of The Seasons, Victor R. Lee
Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications
This paper examines a “misconstrual hypothesis” regarding diagrams of the Earth’s orbit around the sun and how middle school students explain the cause of the seasons. Drawing from 24 semi-structured interviews, I present qualitative analyses of students’ explanations of why temperatures vary in summer and winter and how those are influenced by the elliptical shape of perspective drawings of the Earth’s orbit, common to many science textbooks. The results of the analysis suggest that diagram interpretation does not necessarily follow what has been often predicted in the literature and that conceptualizations can shift quite rapidly as different diagram features are …
Learning From People, Things, And Signs, Michael H.G. Hoffmann
Learning From People, Things, And Signs, Michael H.G. Hoffmann
Michael H.G. Hoffmann
Starting from the observation that small children can count more objects than numbers—a phenomenon that I am calling the “lifeworld dependency of cognition”—and an analysis of finger calculation, the paper shows how learning can be explained as the development of cognitive systems. Parts of those systems are not only an individual's different forms of knowledge and cognitive abilities, but also other people, things, and signs. The paper argues that cognitive systems are first of all semiotic systems since they are dependent on signs and representations as mediators. The two main questions discussed here are how the external world constrains and …