One of the goals of higher education astronomy is to guide students towards becoming expert astronomers, enabling them to participate in the discourse and practices of the discipline (Gee, 2004). However, the specifics of what expert astronomers do in their professional practice are not well documented in the current astronomy education research literature. In particular, there is a lack of knowledge regarding how expert astronomers develop the competence of visual inspection, with previous research highlighting that it is mostly acquired informally (Walsh, 2024). Using data from an autoethnography of participating in astronomy research following a mentorship-apprenticeship model, we will first present how astronomers apply the skill of visual inspection in their professional practices. Following from that, we will discuss some key components in facilitating the development of this skill, that could be leveraged in a more systematic way in astronomy education at the university.

Introduction: In this paper we discuss disciplinary learning and the roles that different modalities can play in the process. We first describe the extant research in the field of social semiotics with an emphasis on the functions of affordance and transduction in university science, before presenting the comparatively sparse research on transformation. Our goal is to identify whether the process of transformation, besides its previously described procedural functions, can have important meaning making functions as well.

Methods: Taking the discipline of cosmology as our point of reference, our data consist of four different forms of the mathematical rearrangement of the Friedmann equation, as observed in university lectures. We analyzed these forms for their meaning making functions using abductive reasoning and the framework of symbolic forms.

Results: We identify an important, hitherto undescribed type of meaning-making —purposeful transformation. We describe its key characteristics (narrowing down meaning potential, foreground-background movement and purposeful direction) and we provide a first definition.

Discussion: First, we discuss the implications of our findings on social semiotics theory, focusing on the notions of disciplinary and pedagogical affordance and the possibility of identifying purposeful transformations in other semiotic systems. Finally, we demonstrate its importance in the teaching and learning of natural sciences.

A long-standing discussion in the physics education literature regards the blending of mathematical knowledge with physics intuition (Eichenlaub & Redish, 2019). Researchers have emphasized that the use of mathematics in physics education has traditionally tended to focus more on the computational aspect to the detriment of building conceptual understanding and physics intuition (Redish, 2017). Different approaches to this problem include teaching conceptual physics before using mathematics (Hewitt, 1983), or teaching them simultaneously, due to their inseparable nature (Van Den Eynde et al., 2020). In this presentation, we explore some components of how experts blend the use of mathematics with physics intuition, by analyzing the rearrangement of the Friedmann equation in cosmology. This rearrangement was analyzed from a conceptual understanding standpoint using the framework of symbolic forms (Sherin, 2001). Our analysis demonstrates how the number of potential symbolic forms associated with each subsequent rearrangement of the equation decreases as we move from line to line. Drawing on this result, we suggest an underlying mechanism driving how physicists perform this rearrangement, consisting of three main components: narrowing down meaning potential, moving aspects between foreground and background and a purposeful direction according to cosmological questions of interest (Kapodistrias & Airey, 2024). Finally, we discuss how being aware of this mechanism can subtly change teaching practice to make these aspects of physics reasoning explicit to students. 

Astronomy uses a wide range of representational formats to produce and mediate disciplinary knowledge, ranging from written language and text to mathematics, images and video simulations. The use of these representations has been a subject of investigation in Astronomy Education Research (AER), with a major focus on different kinds of visual representations and how they can be used to advance Astronomy teaching and learning (i.e., Galano et al., 2018; Salimpour et al., 2021; Trump & Lawler, 2022). In this presentation, we will present findings from our study that aimed at identifying the range of representations used in Higher Education Astronomy and examine how they are used for disciplinary meaning making. Following a social semiotic approach, we catalogued a total of 712 representations from lecture notes and textbooks used in six Higher Education Astronomy courses. Using thematic analysis we categorized them into nine different categories. Subsequently, by implementing the theoretical notion of generic affordances (Kress et al., 2001), we analysed how each representational format has its own meaning making functions, that are leveraged to represent different types of meaning and mediate knowledge either individually or in coordination with other formats. We will present a few exemplar representations from each category to highlight instances were meaning making was facilitated or obstructed in this process. Finally, we discuss the implications of our work for Astronomy Education Research and ideas for further investigation.

Researchers generally agree that physics experts use mathematics in a way that blends mathematical knowledge with physics intuition. However, the use of mathematics in physics education has traditionally tended to focus more on the computational aspect (manipulating mathematical operations to get numerical solutions) to the detriment of building conceptual understanding and physics intuition. Several solutions to this problem have been suggested; some authors have suggested building conceptual understanding before mathematics is introduced, while others have argued for the inseparability of the two, claiming instead that mathematics and conceptual physics need to be taught simultaneously. Although there is a body of work looking into how students employ mathematical reasoning when working with equations, the specifics of how physics experts use mathematics blended with physics intuition remain relatively underexplored. In this presentation, we describe some components of this blending, by analyzing how physicists perform the rearrangement of a specific equation in cosmology. Our data consist of five consecutive forms of rearrangement of the equation, as observed in three separate higher education cosmology courses. This rearrangement was analyzed from a conceptual reasoning perspective using Sherin’s framework of symbolic forms. Our analysis demonstrates how the number of potential symbolic forms associated with each subsequent rearrangement of the equation decreases as we move from line to line. Drawing on this result, we suggest an underlying mechanism for how physicists reason with equations. This mechanism seems to consist of three components: narrowing down meaning potential, moving aspects between the background and the foreground and purposefully transforming the equation according to the discipline’s questions of interest. Finally, we discuss how being aware of the components of this underlying mechanism can potentially affect physics teachers’ practice when using mathematics in the physics classroom and demonstrate a proposed teaching sequence, based on our findings.

Researchers generally agree that physics experts use mathematics in a way that blends mathematical knowledge with physics intuition. However, the use of mathematics in physics education has traditionally tended to focus more on the computational aspect (manipulating mathematical operations to get numerical solutions) to the detriment of building conceptual understanding and physics intuition. Several solutions to this problem have been suggested; some authors have suggested building conceptual understanding before mathematics is introduced, while others have argued for the inseparability of the two, claiming instead that mathematics and conceptual physics need to be taught simultaneously. Although there is a body of work looking into how students employ mathematical reasoning when working with equations, the specifics of how physics experts use mathematics blended with physics intuition remain relatively underexplored. In this paper, we describe some components of this blending, by analyzing how physicists perform the rearrangement of a specific equation in cosmology. Our data consist of five consecutive forms of rearrangement of the equation, as observed in three separate higher education cosmology courses. This rearrangement was analyzed from a conceptual reasoning perspective using Sherin's framework of symbolic forms. Our analysis clearly demonstrates how the number of potential symbolic forms associated with each subsequent rearrangement of the equation decreases as we move from line to line. Drawing on this result, we suggest an underlying mechanism for how physicists reason with equations. This mechanism seems to consist of three components: narrowing down meaning potential, moving aspects between the background and the foreground and purposefully transforming the equation according to the discipline's questions of interest. In the discussion section we highlight the potential that our work has for generalizability and how being aware of the components of this underlying mechanism can potentially affect physics teachers' practice when using mathematics in the physics classroom.

Astronomy utilizes a wide range of semiotic resources (graphs, language, images, mathematics, etc.) in its processes of creating and communicating disciplinary knowledge (Kress et al., 2001). These semiotic resources usually work together to give holistic access to disciplinary meanings, in a multifaceted way. Building on this idea, Airey & Linder (2009) have proposed the concept of a critical constellation of semiotic resources or modes (figure 1). The concept of critical constellations describes the idea that semiotic resources that represent knowledge in various ways, give access to different aspects of disciplinary knowledge. Consequently, this means that it is impossible to experience disciplinary knowledge holistically by becoming fluent in one semiotic system alone (Airey & Linder, 2009). Therefore, for someone to become an expert astronomer, it is necessary to become fluent across different semiotic systems: from handling mathematical expressions to writing and understanding code and visually inspecting and interpreting complex astronomical images (figure 2). In this paper, we aim to analyze how different semiotic resources in astronomy can be used in orchestration (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001), so that their individual affordances complement each other to create a collective affordance (Linder, 2013) that makes disciplinary meaning accessible – what Lemke (2005) has described as multiplying meaning. We will do so by presenting examples of critical constellations of different resources (galaxy images, galaxy rotation curves and the Cosmic Microwave Background map) that occurred in our data collection for our project regarding knowledge creation and mediation with different representations in higher education astronomy. 

The field of astronomy is in many ways unique. In most other sciences, experimental investigation has been a major source of knowledge. Astronomy, however, is observational rather than experimental. Astronomers cannot carry out controlled experiments with their objects of interest—they are too big and too far away. We are stuck here on our small, insignificant planet and forced to simply observe. This observational nature of the discipline affects the ways in which astronomical knowledge is created, and this, in turn, affects the ways in which astronomy is taught and learned. 

This project aims to examine how astronomy knowledge is created and mediated through the use of representations (semiotic resources) and the role these representations then play in student learning. Following a social semiotic approach (Airey & Linder, 2017), we carry out a semiotic audit (Airey & Erikson, 2019) in order to determine the disciplinary and pedagogical affordances (Airey, 2015) of the representations used in the observation and visualization of large-scale structures in the Universe The ultimate goal is a better understanding of how these representations can be used and potentially adapted for educational purposes.  Our research questions are as follows:

RQ1       What is the ecosystem of representations presented to students of astronomy?

RQ2       What are the disciplinary and pedagogical affordances of these representations?

RQ3       In what ways do the individual representations work together to mediate astronomy knowledge?

In order to answer RQ1, we carried out an audit of the range of representations in three courses at Stockholm University (Cosmology, Introduction to Astrophysics and Observational Astronomy). We observed lectures, analysed lecture notes and textbooks and interviewed university lecturers. From the data collected, our analysis followed two steps: first, we categorised the representations we found using the framework developed by Salimpour et al. (2021) for the topic of cosmology. Thereafter, for RQ 2 we chose to focus our analysis on three specific representations that are highly relevant for the discipline and therefore have high disciplinary affordance—namely the Cosmic Microwave Background Temperature Fluctuations Map, the Galaxy Density & Redshift Distribution and the Properties of the Universe Graph. We analysed these three central representations with a focus on identifying their disciplinary affordance, comparing this with those aspects of disciplinary knowledge that are present (noticeable) in each representation and those that are appresent: i.e., aspects that are obvious to disciplinary experts, but strictly speaking not directly observable for a novice (Marton & Booth, 2013).

Our audit shows a wide variety of different representational forms are presented to students, from graphs and mathematics to computer coding and 3D animations. However, despite this range, there is no indication that the coordination of these representations in the educational setting is performed in such a way that focuses on making the appresent aspects of disciplinary knowledge more accessible for students. The pedagogical affordance of the individual representations used was generally low and it was usual for the representational products of observations to be used in an unmodified form. The results point out to further conclusions regarding the underdevelopment of teaching methods and explanatory mechanisms when it comes to teaching subjects of modern science using the latest research findings.

Science disciplines utilize a wide range of semiotic resources such as graphs, diagrams, language, mathematics, hands-on work with laboratory equipment, gesture, etc. (Kress et al. 2001). Here, transduction (that is movement between semiotic systems) has been put forward as a powerful teaching and learning tool because this movement between representational systems brings different aspects of a disciplinary concept into focus (Volkwyn et al., 2019). By the same token, transformation (that is making changes within the same semiotic system) has been viewed as less important educationally. In this presentation, we discuss what we call purposeful transformation, where rearrangement of an equation fills an important function. One interesting aspect of purposeful transformation is that it simultaneously raises both the disciplinary and pedagogical affordance of the equation (Airey, 2015; Airey & Linder, 2017). Similar transformations have been documented in other semiotic systems such as graphs (Rodriguez et al., 2020).