higher education science and engineering: generating interaction with the variation perspective on...

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Higher education scienceand engineering: Generatinginteraction with the variationperspective on learningCedric Linder a & Duncan Fraser ba Uppsala University and University of the Western Cape ,b University of Cape Town ,Published online: 11 Nov 2009.

To cite this article: Cedric Linder & Duncan Fraser (2009) Higher education science andengineering: Generating interaction with the variation perspective on learning, Education asChange, 13:2, 277-291, DOI: 10.1080/16823200903234802

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DOI: 10.1080/16823200903234802 © The University of Johannesburg

Education As Change, Vol. 13, No. 2, December 2009, pp. 277 - 291

277

Higher education science and engineering: Generating interaction with the variation perspective on learningCedric LinderUppsala University and University of the Western CapeDuncan FraserUniversity of Cape Town

Abstract

Contemporary learning research and development that is embedded in primary and secondary �� Two studies that have explored the experience of variation in university contexts – one from chemical engineering (distillation), and one from introductory physics (Newton’s third law) – are summarised to illustrate the nature of the compelling results attained in these contexts, and a third study (of students learning the Bohr model of the atom) is taken up to better illustrate the nature of learning with variation�!��

Key words: chemical engineering, physics, student learning, variation perspective on learning, variation theory of learning

Introduction

Discipline-based education research in higher education science and engineering has tended to focus on learning hurdles in the form and content of what is intended to be learned, from a perspective that can broadly be seen as individual constructivism. Here, particularly in the higher education context, the physics education research community has arguably produced the most extensive work (see, for example, McDermott & Redish, 1999). The results of this work have, in turn, profoundly influenced university teaching practice across physics and related engineering classrooms internationally (see, for example, Redish, 2003). Recently, the physics education research community has been taking a broader perspective, and the research activity has explored the students’ perspective on teaching by looking for the kinds of teaching–learning relationships that can inform practice and the attainment of better learning outcomes. Recent research has drawn methodologically on developing theoretical notions of learning resources, framing and representation, metacognition, gender, student epistemology

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Cedric Linder and Duncan Fraser

and social identity. This trend has also been mirrored in other discipline-based education research contexts, such as mathematics and engineering.

At the same time, more generic education research has been appearing in an area commonly known as ‘the student learning literature’. Collectively, this work can be brought together as an extensive examination of teaching–learning relations and their implications for student learning and the crafting of teaching practice. Well-known examples are: approach to teaching, approach to learning, conceptions of teaching, and conceptions of learning (see, for example, Prosser & Trigwell, 1999). Much of this generic work has been underpinned by the ‘phenomenographic approach’ (see, for example, Marton & Booth, 1997). What is distinctive about phenomenography is that it offers a theoretical modelling of student learning in terms of changes in the way of seeing or experiencing something, and the constituents needed for such a view of learning to take place (see, for instance, Pang, 2003). However, unlike the earlier described work that has so extensively impacted on higher education, what phenomenography has to offer in terms of informing teaching and learning has so far not been widely reported on in either the discipline-based education research or generic student learning literature. Our article describes the work done in introductory physics and intermediate chemical engineering that illustrates the potential fruitfulness of having teaching practice informed by such theoretical modelling.

This theoretical modelling is known as an ‘anatomy of awareness’ constituted ‘from an educational point of view’ to characterise variation as the ‘sine qua non of learning’ (Marton & Trigwell, 2000). Although this framing is not a theory of experience, its fundamentals were inspired by Gurwitsch’s phenomenology of the field of consciousness (1964).

The following essential parts of this phenomenographic notion of the ‘anatomy of awareness’ (Marton & Booth, 1997) underpin the model of the variation approach that we will outline next.

1. One cannot attend to everything in the same way at the same time; there are differences in the degree of prominence.

2. At any given instant, some aspects of a phenomenon can come to the fore as figural; get focal attention. At the same time others recede into the background; things co-existing in the background are not directly focused on – they have peripheral attention.

3. After a new situation or phenomenon is experienced, the structure of one’s awareness can change dramatically. In other words, it is possible for something that was very peripheral to become central.

Marton and Booth (1997) identify three possible responses to variation:

Certain things are transcended. This means that they are completely overlooked, and not even noticed at all. For instance, before one of us bought a maroon Golf motor car, he had never noticed any of the maroon Golfs on the road (in other words, they were transcended), but once he owned one, suddenly he was seeing maroon Golfs everywhere he looked.

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Higher education science and engineering

Some things are taken for granted. Things that are taken for granted have already been noticed previously. Having become familiar, we no longer consider them worthy of further examination. A famous example of this is in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, in which all the witnesses swore nobody entered or left the house, but the milkman had in fact done so in full view of them all. Sometimes things that are taken for granted have already been incorporated into our thinking, and form part of the implicit assumptions we make about a particular situation.

Other things come into focal awareness. When something comes into focal awareness, or into the foreground, it is noticed in a way that it was not seen before. Those things that are not in focus recede to the background or margin. In the example we used above, maroon Golfs came into focal awareness for one of us once he owned one.

In phenomenography, learning has been characterised as using an ‘anatomy of awareness’ framing. Broadly speaking, this has involved two parts: First, the three characteristics described above create a way to model the ‘what’ and ‘how’ aspects of students learning experiences where the relationship between the ‘what’ and ‘how’ is depicted in terms of both the content of, and the relationship between, the three dynamics. Second, the relationship between what it means to learn something, becoming aware of something and being able to discern something were brought together as a theory of learning (Marton & Booth, 1997; Bowden & Marton, 1998; further exemplified by Marton & Tsui, 2004, in particular Marton et al., 2004), using parts of the structure of awareness outlined above. From this framing, a particularly powerful characterisation of learning has emerged that has been shown to be extremely fruitful in school learning environments, vis-à-vis extending the possibility of learning (see, for example, Marton & Morris, 2002; Marton & Tsui, 2004; Pang et al., 2006). This characterisation has become known as the ‘variation theory of learning’. However, to avoid the possibility of challenges to its status as a ‘theory’, we will refer to it as the ‘variation perspective on learning’.

The Variation Perspective on Learning

The variation perspective on learning is not a teaching method, it is a theoretical modelling of learning that can inform the crafting of teaching practices. An important aspect of our notion of crafting of teaching practice is that such ‘crafting’ comes from an experiential, knowledgeable and strong conceptually based teaching–learning reflection aimed at enhancing the possibility of learning (cf. Marton & Booth, 1997; Bowden & Marton, 1998; Marton et al., 2004)

When an education environment is built on the variation perspective on learning, the following assumption drives the crafting of teaching practice: for students to learn they need to be able to notice things that are new and important in relation to what needs to be learnt. In other words, critical features of the intended learning need to come into focal awareness for the learners. Linder et al. (2006) make the point that this idea can be tacitly found in much of the contemporary interactive teaching and learning literature, particularly for physics in higher education contexts; what is missing are explicit characterisations of the systematic aspects that

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promote the possibility of learning – where learning is taken to be principally about developing capabilities that empower a learner.

‘…. people act not in relation to situations as such, but in relation to situations as they perceive, experience, and understand them. … If we want learners to develop certain capabilities, we must make it possible for them to develop a certain way of seeing or experiencing. Consequently, arranging for learning implies arranging for developing learners’ ways of seeing or experiencing, i.e. developing the eyes through which the world is perceived’ (Marton et al., 2004:8).

In its most basic form, the central theoretical aspect that underpins the variation perspective is that when a critical feature of what we would like students to learn is purposely varied while other aspects are purposely and systematically kept invariant, the varying aspect is then most likely to come into focus (it is discerned). Embedded in this basic theoretical attribute are the following components: recognition of contrasts, generalising across appearances, separating critical aspects, and fusing critical aspects (ibid.:16). For these types of discernment to occur simultaneity is required, and simultaneity here has diachronic and/or synchronic components. Diachronic simultaneity refers to bringing together in your mind aspects or instances of a phenomenon that you have experienced in the past with what you are currently experiencing of it. Synchronic simultaneity is when critical dimensions of a phenomenon are brought together (discerned and focused on) at the same time. Collectively, these constructs characterise what is known as a ‘space of learning’.

… “a space” does not refer to the absence of constraints, but to something actively constituted. It delimits what can be possibly learned (in sense of discerning) in that particular situation. … The space of learning tells us what it is possible to learn in a certain situation [from the point of a particular object of learning]. (ibid.:21–22)

The nature of the variation experienced will determine the nature of the learning space that will be forged in the teaching–learning interaction. When the variation is limited, the opportunity for learning will be constrained and the learning space will be narrow. However, when the variation encompasses the whole realm of critical aspects of the object of learning, then the opportunity for learning enlarges, meaning the learning space will be wide. Runesson (1999) elegantly describes each different aspect of the phenomenon that is varied as a new dimension of the learning space. She illustrates this with teaching and learning about geometric squares. One can simply define a square as a figure with four equal sides and four equal angles, or one can vary the length of the sides (and show that it is still a square), or the angles (in which case they are no longer equal and it is no longer a square), or the number of sides (where we can still have all the angles and lengths being the same, and it is a regular polygon but no longer a square, which shows that a square is a special case of a regular polygon). Each aspect that is varied is a separate dimension of variation around the properties of the square, and each in turn contributes to opening up the possibility of learning more about what makes a square a square.

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The teaching–learning interactive widening of the learning space increases the possibility of learning. While this widening cannot guarantee learning outcomes, it does extend the opportunity vis-à-vis possibilities for learning.

Exploring the variation perspective on learning in engineering and physics

We have explored the variation perspective in two contexts in higher education. The first is distillation in an intermediate chemical engineering computer simulation education environment. The second is Newton’s Third Law in an introductory physics lecture environment.

To incorporate the perspective into the conceptual framing of our crafting of teaching practice we needed to be able to identify the educationally critical aspects of the intended object of learning. To do this we drew on the notion of a learning study, as outlined by Pang and Marton (2003). The aspects of such a learning study to which we gave attention are detailed below.

1. Choosing the object of learning – a capability, appreciation or understanding to be developed.

2. Gaining insight into what students can be expected to bring to the teaching-learning environment in terms of existing understandings and learning hurdles.

3. Planning and implementing the teaching-learning interactional experience.4. Evaluating and revising the teaching-learning interactional experience by using a post-

lesson study, which in our case included interviews with students and results of formal evaluation of the learning outcomes.

(a) Distillation in an intermediate chemical engineering computer simulation education environment

At the university where Duncan Fraser works, distillation is presented to third-year chemical engineering students in a course on separation processes. A number of years ago he had set up a distillation simulation for students as an ‘experiment’ in a parallel laboratory course. However, tutors reported that students did not engage with the simulation satisfactorily, but just seemed to be going through the motions in order to complete what was required of them (i.e. a compliance approach). We decided to improve the use of simulation in learning of distillation by application of the variation perspective on learning (Fraser et al., 2006). Figure 1 shows a typical distillation column, with its key input and output parameters. Here is a summary of how we addressed the learning study items listed earlier.

Choosing the object of learning. The original exercise required students to set up a distillation problem in the simulation programme, and to use it to explore how a number of different parameters affected the functioning of the distillation column. The students were asked to change six different parameters affecting the operation of the simulated distillation column and observe their effects. Our evaluation was that the dual objectives (setting up and exploring)

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detracted from the possible learning that could take place, and, in addition, there were too many things being varied in a single exercise.

Figure 1: Diagram of a continuous distillation column

Gaining insight into what students can be expected to bring to the teaching–learning environment in terms of existing understandings and learning hurdles. The way our third-year laboratory exercises were scheduled meant that most students would not have had any formal theory of distillation class work before the laboratory exercise, and hence there was no obvious past experience of distillation they could draw on for the simulation learning experience. A class test taken shortly before the new simulation was introduced, showed that few students had good functional knowledge of distillation.

Planning and implementing the teaching–learning interactional experience. Following the above we decided to reduce the breadth of possible learning by presenting the students with a problem already set up and running on the simulation programme, and identified the educationally critical simulation parameters that needed to be varied systematically (two, where the original excersise offered a non-systematic variation of six).

Evaluating and revising the teaching–learning interactional experience. Our evaluation consisted of a set of in-depth interviews with students and discussions with their simulation tutors. The results showed that the taking on of a variation perspective in such a context was potentially very rewarding (Fraser et al., 2006).

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The following outlines how we examined the effectiveness of drawing on variation theory to broaden what it is possible to learn in a teaching situation, such as the one we have described. Because we were looking for teaching insight, both in terms of learning and in terms of how the object of learning was handled, we have summarised the results in terms of the following themes that emerged from the data:

Experiencing enhanced learning opportunities

What follows is one typical description from what students told us about their learning experiences (all names are pseudonyms):

Greg: ‘Dead zones, if you increase the number of trays too much you get dead zones, I didn’t know that … I didn’t know there were dead zones.’

From statements like these we would argue that the students identified for themselves that they were looking at distillation columns with new discernment. The simulation exercise, therefore, provided an environment in which enhanced learning could take place, through a different representation of the system being studied. What is significant here is that the opportunity for learning can be characterised as enhanced by narrowing the objectives of the exercise.

Drawing on previous knowledge of distillation in a meaningful way

During the simulation exercise students were required to increase the purity of the distillate by varying the number of trays in the column. Eight out of the nine pairs of students immediately knew that they had to increase the number of trays in order to increase the purity, illustrating how the students drew on their previous knowledge of distillation columns.

Students discerned critical elements of what they were discovering in the light of their previous knowledge and this is illustrated in the following quote:

Jason: ‘Our (distillation) knowledge isn’t amazing, so it was nice to put things in and then it would trigger things like oh, if you put the feed stage here it gets a better composition or if you have a high reflux it will give you a better composition.’

It was also interesting for us to note that some students started to appreciate the importance of their prior knowledge for their learning about distillation. The timing of this exercise, relative to their course on distillation, meant that previous knowledge was available to them, and the students clearly exhibited diachronic simultaneity.

What was focused on?

The concepts mentioned most often in the interviews were feed tray location and number of trays, which were the parameters that were varied explicitly. These were clearly the concepts that the students focused on the most.

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The recognition of learning

What was surprising was that the students in only two of the nine groups felt they had learned something new about distillation columns. Probing of the other seven groups revealed that they clearly had learned something new. Evidence for this may be seen in the following student comments:

Thandi: ‘See, (the simulation) actually helps you understand what you are doing in class much better.’

From the discussion above, we would argue that both feed tray location and number of trays (both topics they were already familiar with) were seen in new ways by the students. This is also true of the concentration profiles in the column. Dead zones, which is a concept they had not encountered before, was also something new they had learned.

It appeared at first that these students had a very narrow concept of learning, which did not include expanding their knowledge about something they already knew. On further reflection, it would seem that possibly the term ‘new’ might have confused the students and also that the students were not used to articulating learning in these terms (they normally have their learning assessed in conventional tests that largely involve problem solving).

Associating ‘playing around’ with a system with learning

In many of the interviews students mentioned the idea of ‘playing around’ with the system. This poses the question of whether the students associate playing around with the system with learning.

Six of the nine pairs said they would come back and fiddle with the simulation in their own time. Two more pairs said they would use it for a project, and only one pair said they would not play with it at all. Most of the pairs indicated that they would be able to use this simulation for other purposes in the future.

The comment that students would come back in their own time and ‘play around’ with the system was unexpected. From their comments we infer that ‘playing around’ with the simulation means that they are wanting to explore the effect of another parameter on the system performance.

Additional insights

In addition to the points raised above, the most interesting extra insights were:

(1) that we needed to narrow the object of learning in order to increase the possibility for learning; and,

(2) that the students did not easily recognise that exploration using a computer simulation was significant learning, even though they had clearly learned much through it.

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An interesting question arising from (1) above, is whether there is a limiting number of features that a student could be expected to be able to discern in a single learning episode. Our results suggest that this may be the case and this warrants further investigation.

Improvements to method used

At the same time we recognise that the method we used for our evaluation could be improved in the following ways:

By taking videos of the students handling the object of learning. By undertaking a much more in-depth study of the key conceptual difficulties in the

object of learning from the students’ perspective. This could also be accompanied by the development of a set of questions which would probe students’ understanding of key concepts, to be used to test improvements in understanding.

(b) Newton’s Third Law in an introductory physics lecture education environment

One of the universities where Cedric Linder works, introductory physics is taken by a large number of students from different programmes. We decided to explore explicitly the application of Newton’s Third Law in an accelerating two-body problem, such as a horse starting to pull a cart (Linder et al., 2006) using the variation approach. This is an area of introductory physics where students world-wide typically experience complex learning hurdles. The context was two large classes made up of students with similar backgrounds, who were being taught by the same lecturer. Here is a summary of how we addressed the learning study items listed earlier.

Choosing the object of learning. The construction of an interactive environment was created by using a cartoon (see Figure 2) as a basis for discussion. This cartoon shows a horse talking to its owner-farmer. In the cartoon the farmer tells the horse to ‘giddy-up’ and get going, to which the horse replies that she cannot get the cart moving because, by Newton’s Third Law, as hard as she pulls the cart so the cart will pull back on her.

Figure 2: Extract from the horse-and-cart cartoon (by permission of Paul Hewitt).

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Gaining insight into what students can be expected to bring to the teaching–learning environment in terms of existing understandings and learning hurdles. There were three parts to this stage. First, we read the education literature dealing with critical features in learning Newton’s Third Law. Second, we asked colleagues who had regularly taught classical mechanics at the introductory level what they saw as being the critical features. Third, we used interviews with a selection of students and the well-known Force Concept Inventory (Hestenes et al., 1992) to capture the nature of the understanding that the students were bringing with them into the lectures. The critical feature list we obtained is given in Table 1.

Planning and implementing the teaching–learning interactional experience. The data came from two different classes that were being taught the same content during the same semester by the same lecturer. One of us (Cedric Linder) was the lecturer. The teaching situation arose from a need to accommodate a larger set of student course combinations than anticipated. At this time we had 86 students in one class, and 42 in the other. We labelled the class of 86, in which the variation approach was to be used explicitly, the variation class, and the class of 46, in which it was not to be used explicitly, the ad hoc class.

Table 1: Summary of the identified educationally critical aspects of Newton’s Third Law as an intended object of learning in introductory physics.

Critical features to be discerned How these features were addressed

Newton’s Third Law concerns pairs

of forces arising from interactions

The concept of a physics-designated ‘system’ and using it to:

(a) Identify the pairs of different forces that act on the

different interacting bodies

(b) Decide which body to consider to answer question (not

both)

Systems – the body of interest (take

the horse to be a system and take the

cart to be a separate system).

· Isolate the body of interest as a system

· Treat it as a point mass

· Identify the forces acting ON the point mass

Representation trajectory

· Written

· Sketch

· ‘Free body diagram’

· Mathematics diagram with each body represented as a

point mass

Mathematical formulation· For each system, apply Newton’s Laws to forces acting

ON the system

The object of learning for both classes was an understanding of how to apply Newton’s Third Law to two connected, physics-designated, systems. The teaching exemplar that is typically used here is a horse pulling a cart. Thus we decided to use a conceptual-physics cartoon

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created by Paul Hewitt, author of the widely acclaimed introductory textbook, Conceptual Physics (2002). The in-class time allocation was two 45-minute lecture slots. Both classes were given the extract from the farmer-horse cartoon in printed form, and using the overhead projector (see Figure 2). The students were asked to discuss the cartoon with their neighbours with the following question in mind: Is the horse making a good argument, and how could we defend our judgement in a good physics way? Groups of students were then called upon to open up class discussion with their answers.

In the ad hoc class the lecturer gave tacit support to the discussion almost immediately moving into ‘how to best solve the problem’. The teaching interaction approach involved schematically and mathematically capturing the students’ discussion on the blackboard. Then, following a traditional format, the lecturer began crafting a solution on the blackboard using a highly interactive dialogue approach with the groups of students (the flow of the teaching–learning dialogue was very much determined by what the students’ were proposing).

In the variation class the approach was identical except that now the problem was purposely crafted around variation to draw the critical features to the fore as per the detail given in Table 1. The systematic detail given in Table 1 was purposely tracked into the teaching–learning interaction. Within these dynamics the horse as a physics-designated system was focused on first, and then the cart.

Evaluating and revising the teaching–learning interactional experience. Our comparison of learning outcomes for the two classes provided a strong case that our explicit use of variation had made a significant educational difference (Linder et al., 2006). This evidence was:

1. We repeated the horse and cart problem in the students’ final examination and compared on average how students from the two classes dealt with the problem;

2. The Force Concept Inventory Newton’s Third Law questions (four of them) formed part of the students’ final examination; and,

3. We re-interviewed 14 of the 17 students we had originally interviewed about their understanding of Newton’s Third Law. This took place a month after the final examination.

The results of these three different forms of assessment are summarised in Table 2.

For the horse and cart examination problem, 79 students in the variation class took the final examination and 42 in the ad hoc class. In the variation class 63 solved the problem correctly and in the ad hoc class only 15 solved it correctly.

On the Force Concept Inventory questions, the variation class averaged three out of four for the Newton’s Third Law test items, and the ad hoc class averaged only one.

The fourteen students of the original seventeen students interviewed from the variation class who had the greatest learning difficulty at the time of the pre-interview were re-interviewed. In these post-interviews, nine students were able to provide good answers, two were able to provide partially correct explanations, and three showed no discernible progress with their learning.

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Table 2: Percentages of students with correct answers in different assessments.

AssessmentExam Assessment

% of class solving problem correctly

Force Concept Inventory Assessment

% of Newton’s Third Law items scored correctly at end

of course

Post interview Assessment

% improving from

inadequate to correct

descriptionß

Ad hoc 36 33 -

Variation 80 75 69

We would argue that these results collectively provide compelling evidence for the explicit use of the variation approach being regarded as a powerful pedagogical tool for enhancing teaching and learning.

Students experiencing variation: Learning as it happens

The discussion so far may have created the impression that the variation approach is essentially a teaching method. Although a certain type of environment has to be created by the teacher, we would argue that the approach is, in epistemological terms, much more about student learning than about adopting a teaching method. In support of this argument we point to contemporary student learning research in higher education areas such as physics and engineering, that has clearly illustrated that having insight into the nature and form of the interactional ‘stuff’ is critical to improving learning outcomes. This ‘stuff’ includes ways of conceptualising learning and teaching, a resources-based framework of cognitive structure, ‘framing’ the learning situation, epistemological beliefs, conceptual dispersion, metacognitive awareness and students’ social identities. For example, see a collection of papers by Entwistle in Special Edition of Higher Education (2005); Hammer et al., 2004; Prosser & Trigwell, 1999; Ramsden, 1992; and Biggs, 1999.

To illustrate the dynamic of experiencing variation of educationally critical aspects of an object of learning we draw on a study which one of the authors was involved in. This study focused on tracking learning in terms of the variation experienced and how it was dealt with by pairs of introductory physics students interacting with a computer simulation that was specifically designed by Van Heuvelen and D’Alessandris (1999) to illuminate the educationally critical aspects of the Bohr model of the atom (Ingerman et al., 2009). For this study, video and audio recordings of the interactions between pairs of students and the simulation programme were analysed for the nature and form of any emergence of student-recognised variation. For example, here is a student explaining how she came to appreciate, through experiencing variation in energy levels, that there could be more than four energy levels in an atom (many students at this level do not appreciate that the number of possible energy levels is unlimited):

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Alex: In my tutorials, my past tutorials, when we were doing this subject, there were like a line from like E1 [energy level 1] to E4, there were no more than that, then I get surprised when I see E1 to E6 […]

Researcher: Okay, so you’re saying when you did the tutorials you thought that there could only be four energy levels?

Alex: Yes, then this [six energy levels present in the computer simulation session] tells me there is no limitation. (emphasis added)

Alex took four energy levels as a given for all cases, but intercting with the simulation, where six energy levels are shown opened the aspect (discerned) of the number of energy levels to Alex (‘I got surprised’). As a result, Alex notices for the first time that there are actually an infinite number of possible energy levels (there is no limitation).

In the single episode presented in this thread of learning, Alex discerns a dimension of variation within a particular aspect (the number of energy levels) in different portrayals of the Bohr atom, and immediately recognises a meaning, which makes sense in terms of the whole: the number of energy levels is actually unlimited, but may be portrayed with a limited number (Ingerman et al., 2009:10).

The results were depicted in terms of the ‘generative metaphor’ (Schön, 1983) ‘threads of learning’. This generative metaphor depicted the linking of experienced variation to the structure of student-understanding as it developed in terms of an expanding anatomy of awareness. Here, two stages of learning progress were identified. First, a discerning of variation, and second, a constituting of meaning from this experience of variation to provide a vivid and powerful illustration of the theoretical aspects of the variation approach in an empirical form that is situated in students’ learning as it happens.

Conclusion

The main purpose of including these studies in this article is to share how we found variation theory to be a powerful tool for helping us improve student learning. In this regard, the particular aspects of variation theory we found most fruitful were:

The object of learning – has it been clearly defined, and is it too broad or too narrow? Are we allowing students to access previous knowledge and bring it to bear in this

situation (diachronic simultaneity)? Are we making use of the power of bringing different aspects of a phenomenon into

students’ focal awareness at the same time (synchronic simultaneity)? Have we considered what students may be overlooking, as well as what they may be taking

for granted, so that we can most effectively bring what we would like into their focal awareness?

The variation perspective models learning in terms of a change in the learners’ capability of experiencing an object of learning. The fundamental dynamic in the perspective is the creation

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of an educational environment where the discernment of critical aspects of an object of learning and keeping them in focal awareness is a systematic part of teacher-learner interaction. For teaching and learning physics and engineering in higher education we have made a case for the fundamental theoretical aspect of the modelling of learning that is embedded in the variation approach to be potentially powerful for opening up the space of learning. The work we have done in this area is the first substantive work we know along these lines in higher education. In the light of this, the lessons we have learned will hopefully point to how such work can be carried forward in future studies.

Beyond our own work, which we refer to, we know of little other work done along these lines in university science or engineering contexts. The two books listed in the references, Classroom Discourse and the Space of Learning and What Matters? Discovering Critical Conditions of Classroom Learning provide sufficient empirical evidence that the perspective is worth a much greater and in-depth exploration in areas in higher education, where considerable conceptual and complex learning hurdles are known to be pervasive. Hence, we would encourage teaching colleagues in our disciplines and associated disciplines to incorporate the variation perspective into their crafting of practice, vis-à-vis the striving to enhance teaching–learning interaction and improve learning outcomes.

References

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Van Heuvelen, A., and D’Alessandris, P. D. (1999). ActivPhysics 2. USA: Addison-Wesley.

Corresponding author

Cedric Linder Uppsala University P.O. Box 256 SE-751 05 Uppsala, SWEDEN Phone: +46 18 471 3539 Fax: +46 18 471 20 00 E-Mail: [email protected]

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