Abstract
The natural world is highly dynamic and complex. Scientists aspire to understand this complex world through observations, investigations and inferences. For this purpose, scientists isolate specific phenomena for studying and examine its features through its simplified models and visual representations (VRs). The constructed scientific knowledge is then communicated to the science community through various modalities like, text and image. Socializing students into the world of science therefore, requires educators among other goals, to teach students all about models and representations, to expose students to these representations diversity and characteristics, to use them for promoting the understanding of phenomena and to develop students’ ability to think with representations as scientist do. Teachers’ task though, is not an easy one, because scientific phenomena and its representations are difficult to grasp; they are highly complex, comprising many components, micro and macro levels with explicit or implicit interactions within and among them, they are concrete or abstract, or are dynamic or static entities. In addition, to develop students’ representational competencies teachers themselves have to be fluent, proficient and efficient in these representations use, develop pedagogical-visual-content-knowledge for teaching with visual representations, be aware of the difficulties inherent to the use of representations or their generation, or be able to identify student-related difficulties, those hindering their learning. Because visual representations are widely used to support science teaching, meta representational competence should be developed. However, this need remains an untreated goal, and researchers report students difficulties to learn with visual representations. The chapter discusses the difficulties involved in teaching and how visual representations may this goal.
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Eilam, B., Gilbert, J.K. (2014). The Significance of Visual Representations in the Teaching of Science. In: Eilam, B., Gilbert, J. (eds) Science Teachers’ Use of Visual Representations. Models and Modeling in Science Education, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06526-7_1
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