Educational technology for visualisation in upper secondary physics education : The case of GeoGebra

In order to contribute to our understanding of how technologies can be used to visualise physical phenomena in order to support teaching and learning of the phenomena at hand, this licentiate thesis explores the ways in which visual representations created with GeoGebra can be used in upper-secondary physics education. In addition, this thesis provides a new model that can be used to characterise students’ representational competence. This thesis is a compilation of two journal articles. The first article is a systematic review of the current literature on how GeoGebra can be used to support physics education in upper-secondary schools. The second article explores students’ use and interpretation of a provided representation, a GeoGebra simulation of friction, and generation of their own representations. The systematic literature review identifies three major ways in which teachers and researchers report using GeoGebra in physics education—namely, (1) to design custom-made computer simulations, (2) to augment real experiments with virtual objects, and (3) to engage students in constructing GeoGebra simulations. The second study shows how students used improvised representations, in the form of gestures, enactments, and drawings, in their interpretation of links between microscopic aspects of friction and the provided GeoGebra simulation. The study also reveals how, during engagement with provided representations, students spontaneously move across modalities, shifting between provided and self-constructed representations, between physical and digital representations, and between modes of communication (including gestures, spoken language, and enactment). In addition, a reanalysis of selected examples of data shows that GeoGebra can facilitate transformations of mathematical representations, supporting the structural role and technical role of mathematics, whereby students are enabled to focus on the physical phenomena at hand and the parameters that influence it.This thesis explores the ways in which visual representations created with GeoGebra can be used in upper-secondary physics education. In addition, this thesis provides a new model that can be used to characterise students’ representational competence. The thesis is a compilation of two journal articles. The first article identifies three major ways in which teachers and researchers report using GeoGebra in physics education. The second article explores students’ use and interpretation of a provided GeoGebra simulation of friction. The study shows how students used improvised representations in their interpretation of links between microscopic aspects of friction and the provided representation. The study also reveals how students spontaneously move across modalities, shifting between provided and self-constructed representations, between physical and digital representations, and between modes of communication (including gestures, spoken language, and enactment). The reanalysis of selected examples of data shows that GeoGebra can facilitate transformations of mathematical representations, supporting the structural and the technical role of mathematics, whereby students are enabled to focus on the physical phenomena at hand