Making Meaning with Math in Physics
Edward F. Redish and Ayush Gupta
Contributed paper presented at GIREP2009, Leicester, UK, August 20, 2009.
Physics makes powerful use of mathematics, yet how this happens is often poorly understood. Professionals closely integrate their mathematical symbology with physical meaning, resulting in a powerful and productive knowledge structures. But because of the way the cognitive system builds expertise, instructors who are expert physicists may have difficulty in unpacking their well-integrated knowledge in order to understand the difficulties novice students have in learning their subject. Despite the fact that students may have previously been exposed to ideas in math classes, the addition of physical contexts can produce severe barriers to learning and sense-making. In order to better understand student difficulties and to unpack expert knowledge, we adopt and adapt ideas and methods from cognitive semantics, a sub-branch of linguistics devoted to understanding how meaning is associated with language. We illustrate this with examples spanning the physics curriculum.
No comments:
Post a Comment