Seminar on student reasoning when combining mathematical and physical knowledge

During the last decades, the framework of conceptual blending has drawn attention in physics and mathematics education research. The framework, originally from linguistics (Fauconnier & Turner, 1998), has been used to analyse student reasoning when combining mathematical and physical knowledge. This research offered new perspectives on the widely recognized ‘transfer’ problem, in which students are supposed to transfer their mathematical knowledge to physics contexts.

Recently, we studied the blending of mathematics and physics in the context of partial differential equations in courses for physics and mathematics undergraduates. In this seminar, we will show that the conceptual blending framework is useful to analyse student reasoning and to design teaching activities to integrate mathematics and physics. We will report about a tutorial in which the educational design was based on the conceptual blending framework and Zandieh’s framework of representations of derivative.

 
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