Profiling the combinations of multiple representations used in large-class teaching: pathways to inclusive practices

Abstract

Teachers select multiple representations and adopt multiple visualization approaches in supporting their students to make meaning of chemical phenomena. Representational competence underpins students’ construction of their mental models of concepts thus it is important that teachers consider this while developing instructional resources. In tertiary chemistry, teachers typically use PowerPoint slides to guide lectures. This instructional resource is transferred between different teachers each semester and, while the sequence of topics are likely to be discussed and agreed upon, the content of the slides can evolve organically in this shared resource over time. The aim of this study was to analyse a teacher-generated resource in the form of a consensus set of course slides to characterise the combination and diversity in representations that students had encountered. This study was set in a unique context since the semester's lecture slides represented a distillation of consensus representations used by multiple chemistry lecturers for at least a decade. The representations included: those created by the lecturers; textbook images (from several texts); photographs and images sourced from the internet. Individual representations in each PowerPoint slide were coded in terms of the level of representation, mode and potential function in supporting deeper understanding of chemistry concepts. Three representational organizing frameworks (functional taxonomy of multiple representations, modes of representation and the chemistry triplet levels of thinking) were integrated to categorise the representations. This qualitative data was subjected to hierarchical cluster analysis and several relationships between the categories and topics taught were identified. Additional qualitative data in the form of student reflections on the perceived utility of specific representations were collected at the end of the semester. The findings from this study inform the design and choice of instructional resources for general chemistry particularly in combining representations to support deeper learning of concepts. A broader goal and application of the findings of this study is to identify opportunities for translation of representations into alternative modalities to widen access and participation in learning chemistry for all students. An example of a strategy for translating representations into tactile modes for teaching the topic of phase change is shared.