Resumen de The use of visual designs in the teaching of energy: students difficulties and teachers' transformations
This thesis presents the results of research on the use of visual designs in the teaching of Energy in Secondary Schools. The results, presented in the three publications of this compendium, cover three interrelated aspects of the use of innovative images to teach the topic of energy:
1. The students' interpretation of visual designs included in teaching materials, 2. The teachers' awareness of the students' difficulties when interpreting these images as well as their insights on the design of visual designs for teaching science, 3. The teachers' use of the proposed visual designs in their classroom practice, focusing on the transformation of these images This research presents two main innovations in the field of study of the use of images in Science Education:
1. Our approach proposes a framework of design and analysis that brings together theory and results from both Science Education and visual semiotics literature.
2. The research considers most of the communicative process where images are involved: design, interpretation by students and teachers, and use of the visual designs in the classroom.
The same images, which we designed, were used throughout the three aspects of the research. Data form different sources were analysed using a qualitative methodology. The data comprises students' and teachers' interviews for the first two aspects, and video recordings of classroom practice, for the third aspect of the research.
The research was conducted as part of the international project STTIS (Science Teacher Training in an Information Society) concerned with teachers' uptake of curricular innovations. This framework has given our research two dimensions. On the one hand the work we carried out in Catalonia with the images we designed and studied, which constitute the main body of the thesis. On the other hand the cross-national comparison, that we were responsible for, of results of similar research by other STTIS partners,. This second aspect has allowed us to explore the generality of the results of our national study giving us grounds to extend some of these results to wider contexts, both in terms of school systems, of types of visual designs, and of science topics.
