Uses and amount of information on cartesian graphs employed in physics teaching at university

IDOYAGA, IGNACIO; MOYA, CÉSAR NAHUEL; LORENZO, MARÍA GABRIELA

Dublin

Conferencia; 12th Conference of the European Science Education Research Association (ESERA); 2017

Dublin City University, University of Limerick, ESERA

Visual Representations, especially graphs, play a key role on sciences? communication and on theexperimental work. Besides, they represent powerful tools in the process of knowing, understanding, andlearning. A great number of graphs are use in Physics teaching. This paper presents an analysis of didacticmaterials. It proposes an initial study about graphs used in Physics classes at University. 67 graphs wererecognized and then analysed. A guide was designed to analyse the cases. Pedagogical use (Expositive,Problem-solving or Instrumental) and Scientific use (Theoretical or Experimental) were discriminated.Graphs? amount of information was determined considering the presence of scales, units, data, name of theaxes, title, physical formulas, algebraic expressions, numerical data on axes, physical symbols. Themethodology consisted in descriptive and inferential statistics. Graphs? amount of information resultedrelatively low. Therefore, students might understand these representations should always be accompaniedby other sources of information. There was a predominance of cartesian graphs for Pedagogical expositiveuse. Only a few Pedagogical instrumental graphs were found. This might represent an obstacle for studentsto understand graphs as inseparable elements used by experimental practice. Problem-solving graphsrevealed a higher amount of information, which may suggest that teachers expect that their students canthemselves to use that profuse information to solve questions and problems. To understand the importancethat teachers give to external representations, like graphs, is significance for improving teaching andlearning at the university.