ABSTRACT
Modelling is a key aspect of doing physics, yet many students struggle to understand modelling and struggle to master the representational formats of physics. This chapter uses LCT to make more explicit to students how knowledge is built in the discipline. The analysis focuses on pedagogic practices in two undergraduate physics courses, one of which involves more explicit focus using LCT on modelling and developing students’ representational competence. In this course, the concepts of ‘semantic gravity’ (context-dependence) and ‘semantic density’ (complexity) provided a framework for characterizing movements between abstract principles and concrete contexts that are required for solving problems in physics. Further, these concepts also helped demonstrate how to explicitly characterize the ways meaning is encapsulated in the dense representations of physics. The chapter provides key understandings of how pedagogic practices impact on both how students approach physics problems and on their representational competence. Moreover, it shows how LCT enables physics lecturers to develop pedagogic approaches that support student learning.
