Abstract
For an adequate comprehension of scientific phenomena, concepts, and experiments, it is necessary to understand several different representations and their interconnections. From a scientific point of view, representational competence (RC) can be understood as students’ ability to correctly generate, interconnect, and translate several representations and use them as problem-solving tools. As theoretical basis for assessing RC, it is not sufficient to only know how students can work with one or several single representations. It is also very important to know how they are able to interconnect representations, for example by translating information from one to another representation-type or adapting representations. Thus, students’ ability to achieve consistency between the overlapping information of a set of representations is a central part of RC and can be called representational coherence ability (RCA). Goal of the study is to develop and evaluate test items for RCA that must require solution processes that focus on representations and interconnections of representations. To vary this focus, two item variants were developed. One variant requires students to relate representations more implicitly and to work only with two representations; the other variant requires students to compare or modify them more explicitly and to use a higher number of representations to solve the tasks. By combining these variants, the spectrum of RC from single or few representations to a system of interconnected representations can be covered. An evaluation of 15 items (488 students) showed acceptable discrimination indexes and reliability on the whole. In particular, the items can be used to assess RCA, and in general, the proposed strategy for item-construction was successful and can be used for the development of further RCA instruments.
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Acknowledgments
We thank all teachers and students from the schools for participating in the study and the federal state Rhineland-Palatinate for the permission to realize it. We are grateful to the German Research Association (DFG, Graduate School GK1561), who funded this research. The opinions reported do not represent the views of the funding body.
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Scheid, J., Müller, A., Hettmannsperger, R., Schnotz, W. (2018). Representational Competence in Science Education: From Theory to Assessment. In: Daniel, K. (eds) Towards a Framework for Representational Competence in Science Education. Models and Modeling in Science Education, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89945-9_13
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