SCIENTIFIC REPRESENTATIONAL FLUENCY: DEFINING, DIAGNOSING AND DEVELOPING

Research into the multiple representations (e.g. graphs, words, equations and diagrams) used by scientists for reasoning and communication has progressed from focussing one individual representations, to an integrated skill set we refer to as representational fluency. Representational fluency incorporates making meaning from representations (metavisualization (Gilbert, 2008)), metacognitive awareness of the purposes and affordances of different representations (metarepresentational competence (diSessa, 2004)) with a recognition of the domain specific constellation of representational use with particular characteristics (representational competence (Kohl & Finkelstein, 2006). METHODS In 2012, we developed the Representational Fluency Survey (RFS) (Hill et al., In Press). To date this has been used with ove