Pre-service teachers' difficulties in reading physics textbook images related to general relativity

초록

In this study we investigated pre-service teachers' difficulties in reading physics textbook images related to general relativity. We interviewed 27 pre-service teachers with majors in physics education, and for that purpose, we used five images taken from a secondary physics textbook. From the results, we first found that 'real-world objects versus symbolic elements' , 'selection and salience' , and 'reading verbal elements' were the types of difficulties most frequently encountered. Second, the textual/graphical features of the images causing difficulties in reading the images were associated with the physics concepts related to the images. Third, 'dimension transformation', that is, understanding the 4D curvature of space visualized as a 2D image, was a unique feature of difficulty in reading images about general relativity. Finally, the reading of a physics image was found to be similar to the composing of a story because reading the image means constructing a process for the interaction between the components of the image by using the ideas of physics. © 2016, Korean Physical Society. All rights reserved.

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