Fredrik Jeppsson | Kristianstad University (original) (raw)

Papers by Fredrik Jeppsson

Touch a metal knife and a piece of wood with your thumbs for two minutes. What is the temperature... more Touch a metal knife and a piece of wood with your thumbs for two minutes. What is the temperature pattern of the two objects?

Med hjalp av en handhallen varmekamera kan elever se hur varme leds genom metall, och hur andra m... more Med hjalp av en handhallen varmekamera kan elever se hur varme leds genom metall, och hur andra material som tra eller plast isolerar. Pa samma satt kan de se varmeutvecklingen da ett suddgummi dra ...

Julia Otsuka's quietly disturbing novel opens with a woman reading a sign in a post office wi... more Julia Otsuka's quietly disturbing novel opens with a woman reading a sign in a post office window. It is Berkeley, California, the spring of 1942. Pearl Harbor has been attacked, the war is on, and though the precise message on the sign is not revealed, its impact on the woman who reads it is immediate and profound. It is, in many ways she cannot yet foresee, a sign of things to come. She readies herself and her two young children for a journey that will take them to the high desert plains of Utah and into a world that will shatter their illusions forever. They travel by train and gradually the reader discovers that all on board are Japanese American, that the shades must be pulled down at night so as not to invite rock-throwing, and that their destination is an internment camp where they will be imprisoned "for their own safety" until the war is over. With stark clarity and an unflinching gaze, Otsuka explores the inner lives of her main characters—the mother, daughte...

The School science review, 2017

Increasingly affordable visualisation technology brings exciting opportunities for making the inv... more Increasingly affordable visualisation technology brings exciting opportunities for making the invisible appear visible. This can support the teaching and learning of many challenging physics concep ...

Journal of Baltic Science Education, 2014

This study investigates primary school children’s (7-8 year-old, N = 25) ideas of mixing of marbl... more This study investigates primary school children’s (7-8 year-old, N = 25) ideas of mixing of marbles and of heat, expressed in small-group predict-observe-explain exercises, and drawings representing the children’s own analogies in a classroom setting. The children were typically found to predict that marbles of two different colours would mix when rocked back and forth on a board. This idea of mixing is slightly more advanced than previously reported in the literature. The children’s ideas of heat included reference to warm objects, their own bodies when exercising, and the process of one warm solid object heating another object in direct contact. In addition, through scaffolding, some of the children expressed a substance view of heat. Finally, the potential and challenges in probing children’s ideas through a combination of data collection techniques in a classroom setting are reflected upon. Key words: heat, mixing, children’s ideas, primary school, classroom setting.

Nordic Studies in Science Education, 2015

Science education research has long taken an interest in how we may make full use of analogies an... more Science education research has long taken an interest in how we may make full use of analogies and metaphors in science teaching. Further, more recently, the role of implicit, conceptual metaphors in connecting abstract conceptual knowledge to concrete embodied experiences has been recognised. The textbook plays a central role in upper secondary teaching, as it is, together with the teacher, a source of knowledge for the students. We have analysed the use of analogies, and explicit and implicit metaphors in two Swedish upper secondary chemistry textbook, and interviewed two of the authors of the textbooks. states and processes were found to be construed by means of the Object-Event and Location-Event Structure metaphors. Explicit metaphors and analogies were presented, but the comparisons were not always elaborated sufficiently in order to guide the students’ interpretations and avoid possible misunderstandings.

Högre utbildning, 2019

Lärarutbildningen uppmärksammas inte sällan för att dess studenter har svårt att uppnå den nivå a... more Lärarutbildningen uppmärksammas inte sällan för att dess studenter har svårt att uppnå den nivå av akademiskt skrivande som krävs, inte minst vid examensarbeten. Som kontrast till den beskrivningen vill vi lyfta fram motexempel, där lärarstudenters examensarbeten och andra skrivuppgifter har nått en sådan kvalitet att de genom samförfattande med handledare och andra medförfattare har kunnat omarbetas och publiceras som vetenskapliga artiklar eller i mer lärartillvända forum, i vårt fall inom fysikdidaktik. Samförfattande med lärarstudenter kan på så vis vara ett sätt att stärka forskningsförankringen i lärarutbildningen. Förutsättningarna för att kunna lyckas med detta diskuteras, bland annat utifrån att under lärarutbildningen gradvis låta studenterna inlemmas i en praktikgemenskap av ämnesdidaktisk forskning.

Venue, 2014

Med hjälp av värmekameror framträder lejonen på Serengeti tydligt på kilometers håll i natten på ... more Med hjälp av värmekameror framträder lejonen på Serengeti tydligt på kilometers håll i natten på BBC:s senaste filmer och läckande fjärrvärmeledningar kan numera upptäckas från helikopter. Det kan låta som science fiction, men den snabba teknikutvecklingen inom detta område gör att vi nu kan ”göra det osynliga synligt” även i det naturvetenskapliga klassrummet.

Infrared Physics & Technology, 2016

International Journal of Science Education, 2015

Many studies have previously focused on how people with different levels of expertise solve physi... more Many studies have previously focused on how people with different levels of expertise solve physics problems. In early work, focus was on characterising differences between experts and novices and a key finding was the central role that propositionally expressed principles and laws play in expert, but not novice, problem solving. A more recent line of research has focused on characterizing continuity between experts and novices at the level of nonpropositional knowledge structures and processes such as image-schemas, imagistic simulation and analogical reasoning. This study contributes to an emerging literature addressing the coordination of both propositional and non-propositional knowledge structures and processes in the development of expertise. Specifically, in this paper we compare problem solving across two levels of expertiseundergraduate students of chemistry and PhD students in physical chemistryidentifying differences in how conceptual metaphors are used (or not) to coordinate propositional and non-propositional knowledge structures in the context of solving problems on entropy. It is hypothesized that the acquisition of expertise involves learning to coordinate the use of conceptual metaphors to interpret propositional (linguistic and mathematical) knowledge and apply it to specific problem situations. Moreover, we suggest that with increasing expertise, the use of conceptual metaphors involves a greater degree of subjective engagement with physical entities and processes. Implications for research on learning and instructional practice are discussed.

International Journal of Science Education, 2015

Research in Science Education, 2014

Research in Science Education, 2015

Physics Education, 2015

Thermal cameras offer real-time visual access to otherwise invisible thermodynamic phenomena, whi... more Thermal cameras offer real-time visual access to otherwise invisible thermodynamic phenomena, which are conceptually demanding for learners during traditional teaching. We present three studies of students' interaction with laboratory activities that employ infrared (IR) cameras to teach challenging thermal concepts at grades 4, 7 and 10-12. Visualization of heat-related concepts in combination with predict-observe-explain (POE) experiments offers students and teachers a pedagogically powerful means for unveiling abstract yet fundamental physics concepts.

Science Education, 2012

Various features of scientific discourse have been characterized in the science education literat... more Various features of scientific discourse have been characterized in the science education literature and challenges students face in appropriating these features have been explored. Using the framework of conceptual metaphor, this paper sought to identify explicit and implicit metaphors in pedagogical texts dealing with the concept of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, an abstract and challenging domain for learners. Three university level textbooks were analyzed from a conceptual metaphor perspective and a range of explicit and implicit metaphors identified. Explicit metaphors identified include Entropy As Disorder, Thermodynamics Processes As Movements Along A Path, and Energetic Exchange As Financial Transactions among others. Implicit metaphors include application and elaboration of the generic Location Event Structure metaphor, application of the Object Event Structure metaphor, and others. The similarities and differences between explicit and implicit metaphors found in the textbooks are also described. Two key pedagogical implications are discussed: that the selection of explicit instructional metaphors can be guided by consistency with implicit metaphors; and that the range of implicit metaphors found in pedagogical texts imply that a multiple instructional metaphor strategy is warranted. The depth of the phenomenon of conceptual metaphor and its implications for future research are also discussed.

Science Education, 2012

This exploratory study in a classroom setting investigates first graders' (age 7-8 years, N = 25)... more This exploratory study in a classroom setting investigates first graders' (age 7-8 years, N = 25) ability to perform analogical reasoning and create their own analogies for two irreversible natural phenomena: mixing and heat transfer. We found that the children who contributed actively to a full-class discussion were consistently successful at making analogical comparisons between known objects provided by a researcher, and some of the children could come up with their own analogies for the abstract natural phenomena with which they interacted. The use of full class and small group settings, shared laboratory experiences of the phenomena and children's drawings as different kinds of scaffolding was found to be helpful for the children's analogical reasoning. As an implication for science education, selfgenerated analogies are put forward as a potential learning tool within a constructivist approach to education. Number of attributes mapped to target Number of relations mapped to target Example Mere appearance Many Few The sun is like an orange Literal similarity Many Many The K5 solar system is like our solar system. Analogy Few Many The atom is like our solar system. Abstraction Few Many The atom is a central force system. Anomaly Few Few Coffee is like the solar system  In a mere appearance comparison, the focus is primarily on mapping shared attributes or perceived surface similarities, e.g. 'the sun is like an orange', round and yellow.  In a literal similarity comparison, the source domain and target domain share both attributes and relations, as is often the case when comparisons are made between instances within the same domain, such as two solar systems.  An analogy focuses on mapping of relations between two domains, but not on mapping of attributes of the involved objects. Discrimination between an analogy and a literal similarity is not a clear-cut issue, but they can be seen as two extremes along a

Science & Education, 2013

Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 2012

Using self-generated analogies has been proposed as a method in a constructivist tradition for st... more Using self-generated analogies has been proposed as a method in a constructivist tradition for students to learn about a new subject, by use of what they previously know. We report on a group exercise on using self-generated analogies to make sense of two thermodynamic processes, reversible adiabatic expansion and free adiabatic expansion of an ideal gas. The participants (N = 8) were physics preservice teacher students at the fourth year of the teacher education program. A main finding was that work with self-generated analogies tended to be accompanied by the students assuming ownership for their learning, manifested in terms of actions of choice and control and the use of exploratory talk. Consequently, several self-generated analogies were elaborated and developed to a high order relational structure. However, we also found that with the use of selfgenerated analogies in science teaching follows the risks of developing idiosyncratic explanations of the encountered phenomena or getting stuck in overly complex comparisons. Sammanfattning: Självgenererade analogier har förts fram som en metod i en konstruktivistisk tradition för att elever och studenter ska kunna lära sig något nytt genom att relatera till vad de redan vet. Vi redogör här för en gruppövning där självgenererade analogier användes för att förstå två termodynamiska processer: reversibel adiabatisk expansion, respektive fri adiabatisk expansion av en ideal gas. Åtta (N = 8) lärarstudenter på fjärde året av utbildningen med inriktning mot fysik på gymnasiet deltog i studien. Ett viktigt resultat var att vid arbete med självgenererade analogier tenderade studenterna att ta ägandeskap för sitt lärande, vilket tog sig uttryck i handlingar såsom aktiva val, kontroll över processen och explorativ dialog. Som en följd utvecklades flera av de självgenererade analogierna till ett stort strukturellt djup. Samtidigt såg vi att vid skapande av egna analogier löper studenter risken att utveckla egna förklaringar av de studerade fenomenen som inte svarar mot dem inom vetenskapen eller snärja in sig i alltför komplexa jämförelser.

Touch a metal knife and a piece of wood with your thumbs for two minutes. What is the temperature... more Touch a metal knife and a piece of wood with your thumbs for two minutes. What is the temperature pattern of the two objects?

Med hjalp av en handhallen varmekamera kan elever se hur varme leds genom metall, och hur andra m... more Med hjalp av en handhallen varmekamera kan elever se hur varme leds genom metall, och hur andra material som tra eller plast isolerar. Pa samma satt kan de se varmeutvecklingen da ett suddgummi dra ...

Julia Otsuka's quietly disturbing novel opens with a woman reading a sign in a post office wi... more Julia Otsuka's quietly disturbing novel opens with a woman reading a sign in a post office window. It is Berkeley, California, the spring of 1942. Pearl Harbor has been attacked, the war is on, and though the precise message on the sign is not revealed, its impact on the woman who reads it is immediate and profound. It is, in many ways she cannot yet foresee, a sign of things to come. She readies herself and her two young children for a journey that will take them to the high desert plains of Utah and into a world that will shatter their illusions forever. They travel by train and gradually the reader discovers that all on board are Japanese American, that the shades must be pulled down at night so as not to invite rock-throwing, and that their destination is an internment camp where they will be imprisoned "for their own safety" until the war is over. With stark clarity and an unflinching gaze, Otsuka explores the inner lives of her main characters—the mother, daughte...

The School science review, 2017

Increasingly affordable visualisation technology brings exciting opportunities for making the inv... more Increasingly affordable visualisation technology brings exciting opportunities for making the invisible appear visible. This can support the teaching and learning of many challenging physics concep ...

Journal of Baltic Science Education, 2014

This study investigates primary school children’s (7-8 year-old, N = 25) ideas of mixing of marbl... more This study investigates primary school children’s (7-8 year-old, N = 25) ideas of mixing of marbles and of heat, expressed in small-group predict-observe-explain exercises, and drawings representing the children’s own analogies in a classroom setting. The children were typically found to predict that marbles of two different colours would mix when rocked back and forth on a board. This idea of mixing is slightly more advanced than previously reported in the literature. The children’s ideas of heat included reference to warm objects, their own bodies when exercising, and the process of one warm solid object heating another object in direct contact. In addition, through scaffolding, some of the children expressed a substance view of heat. Finally, the potential and challenges in probing children’s ideas through a combination of data collection techniques in a classroom setting are reflected upon. Key words: heat, mixing, children’s ideas, primary school, classroom setting.

Nordic Studies in Science Education, 2015

Science education research has long taken an interest in how we may make full use of analogies an... more Science education research has long taken an interest in how we may make full use of analogies and metaphors in science teaching. Further, more recently, the role of implicit, conceptual metaphors in connecting abstract conceptual knowledge to concrete embodied experiences has been recognised. The textbook plays a central role in upper secondary teaching, as it is, together with the teacher, a source of knowledge for the students. We have analysed the use of analogies, and explicit and implicit metaphors in two Swedish upper secondary chemistry textbook, and interviewed two of the authors of the textbooks. states and processes were found to be construed by means of the Object-Event and Location-Event Structure metaphors. Explicit metaphors and analogies were presented, but the comparisons were not always elaborated sufficiently in order to guide the students’ interpretations and avoid possible misunderstandings.

Högre utbildning, 2019

Lärarutbildningen uppmärksammas inte sällan för att dess studenter har svårt att uppnå den nivå a... more Lärarutbildningen uppmärksammas inte sällan för att dess studenter har svårt att uppnå den nivå av akademiskt skrivande som krävs, inte minst vid examensarbeten. Som kontrast till den beskrivningen vill vi lyfta fram motexempel, där lärarstudenters examensarbeten och andra skrivuppgifter har nått en sådan kvalitet att de genom samförfattande med handledare och andra medförfattare har kunnat omarbetas och publiceras som vetenskapliga artiklar eller i mer lärartillvända forum, i vårt fall inom fysikdidaktik. Samförfattande med lärarstudenter kan på så vis vara ett sätt att stärka forskningsförankringen i lärarutbildningen. Förutsättningarna för att kunna lyckas med detta diskuteras, bland annat utifrån att under lärarutbildningen gradvis låta studenterna inlemmas i en praktikgemenskap av ämnesdidaktisk forskning.

Venue, 2014

Med hjälp av värmekameror framträder lejonen på Serengeti tydligt på kilometers håll i natten på ... more Med hjälp av värmekameror framträder lejonen på Serengeti tydligt på kilometers håll i natten på BBC:s senaste filmer och läckande fjärrvärmeledningar kan numera upptäckas från helikopter. Det kan låta som science fiction, men den snabba teknikutvecklingen inom detta område gör att vi nu kan ”göra det osynliga synligt” även i det naturvetenskapliga klassrummet.

Infrared Physics & Technology, 2016

International Journal of Science Education, 2015

Many studies have previously focused on how people with different levels of expertise solve physi... more Many studies have previously focused on how people with different levels of expertise solve physics problems. In early work, focus was on characterising differences between experts and novices and a key finding was the central role that propositionally expressed principles and laws play in expert, but not novice, problem solving. A more recent line of research has focused on characterizing continuity between experts and novices at the level of nonpropositional knowledge structures and processes such as image-schemas, imagistic simulation and analogical reasoning. This study contributes to an emerging literature addressing the coordination of both propositional and non-propositional knowledge structures and processes in the development of expertise. Specifically, in this paper we compare problem solving across two levels of expertiseundergraduate students of chemistry and PhD students in physical chemistryidentifying differences in how conceptual metaphors are used (or not) to coordinate propositional and non-propositional knowledge structures in the context of solving problems on entropy. It is hypothesized that the acquisition of expertise involves learning to coordinate the use of conceptual metaphors to interpret propositional (linguistic and mathematical) knowledge and apply it to specific problem situations. Moreover, we suggest that with increasing expertise, the use of conceptual metaphors involves a greater degree of subjective engagement with physical entities and processes. Implications for research on learning and instructional practice are discussed.

International Journal of Science Education, 2015

Research in Science Education, 2014

Research in Science Education, 2015

Physics Education, 2015

Thermal cameras offer real-time visual access to otherwise invisible thermodynamic phenomena, whi... more Thermal cameras offer real-time visual access to otherwise invisible thermodynamic phenomena, which are conceptually demanding for learners during traditional teaching. We present three studies of students' interaction with laboratory activities that employ infrared (IR) cameras to teach challenging thermal concepts at grades 4, 7 and 10-12. Visualization of heat-related concepts in combination with predict-observe-explain (POE) experiments offers students and teachers a pedagogically powerful means for unveiling abstract yet fundamental physics concepts.

Science Education, 2012

Various features of scientific discourse have been characterized in the science education literat... more Various features of scientific discourse have been characterized in the science education literature and challenges students face in appropriating these features have been explored. Using the framework of conceptual metaphor, this paper sought to identify explicit and implicit metaphors in pedagogical texts dealing with the concept of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, an abstract and challenging domain for learners. Three university level textbooks were analyzed from a conceptual metaphor perspective and a range of explicit and implicit metaphors identified. Explicit metaphors identified include Entropy As Disorder, Thermodynamics Processes As Movements Along A Path, and Energetic Exchange As Financial Transactions among others. Implicit metaphors include application and elaboration of the generic Location Event Structure metaphor, application of the Object Event Structure metaphor, and others. The similarities and differences between explicit and implicit metaphors found in the textbooks are also described. Two key pedagogical implications are discussed: that the selection of explicit instructional metaphors can be guided by consistency with implicit metaphors; and that the range of implicit metaphors found in pedagogical texts imply that a multiple instructional metaphor strategy is warranted. The depth of the phenomenon of conceptual metaphor and its implications for future research are also discussed.

Science Education, 2012

This exploratory study in a classroom setting investigates first graders' (age 7-8 years, N = 25)... more This exploratory study in a classroom setting investigates first graders' (age 7-8 years, N = 25) ability to perform analogical reasoning and create their own analogies for two irreversible natural phenomena: mixing and heat transfer. We found that the children who contributed actively to a full-class discussion were consistently successful at making analogical comparisons between known objects provided by a researcher, and some of the children could come up with their own analogies for the abstract natural phenomena with which they interacted. The use of full class and small group settings, shared laboratory experiences of the phenomena and children's drawings as different kinds of scaffolding was found to be helpful for the children's analogical reasoning. As an implication for science education, selfgenerated analogies are put forward as a potential learning tool within a constructivist approach to education. Number of attributes mapped to target Number of relations mapped to target Example Mere appearance Many Few The sun is like an orange Literal similarity Many Many The K5 solar system is like our solar system. Analogy Few Many The atom is like our solar system. Abstraction Few Many The atom is a central force system. Anomaly Few Few Coffee is like the solar system  In a mere appearance comparison, the focus is primarily on mapping shared attributes or perceived surface similarities, e.g. 'the sun is like an orange', round and yellow.  In a literal similarity comparison, the source domain and target domain share both attributes and relations, as is often the case when comparisons are made between instances within the same domain, such as two solar systems.  An analogy focuses on mapping of relations between two domains, but not on mapping of attributes of the involved objects. Discrimination between an analogy and a literal similarity is not a clear-cut issue, but they can be seen as two extremes along a

Science & Education, 2013

Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 2012

Using self-generated analogies has been proposed as a method in a constructivist tradition for st... more Using self-generated analogies has been proposed as a method in a constructivist tradition for students to learn about a new subject, by use of what they previously know. We report on a group exercise on using self-generated analogies to make sense of two thermodynamic processes, reversible adiabatic expansion and free adiabatic expansion of an ideal gas. The participants (N = 8) were physics preservice teacher students at the fourth year of the teacher education program. A main finding was that work with self-generated analogies tended to be accompanied by the students assuming ownership for their learning, manifested in terms of actions of choice and control and the use of exploratory talk. Consequently, several self-generated analogies were elaborated and developed to a high order relational structure. However, we also found that with the use of selfgenerated analogies in science teaching follows the risks of developing idiosyncratic explanations of the encountered phenomena or getting stuck in overly complex comparisons. Sammanfattning: Självgenererade analogier har förts fram som en metod i en konstruktivistisk tradition för att elever och studenter ska kunna lära sig något nytt genom att relatera till vad de redan vet. Vi redogör här för en gruppövning där självgenererade analogier användes för att förstå två termodynamiska processer: reversibel adiabatisk expansion, respektive fri adiabatisk expansion av en ideal gas. Åtta (N = 8) lärarstudenter på fjärde året av utbildningen med inriktning mot fysik på gymnasiet deltog i studien. Ett viktigt resultat var att vid arbete med självgenererade analogier tenderade studenterna att ta ägandeskap för sitt lärande, vilket tog sig uttryck i handlingar såsom aktiva val, kontroll över processen och explorativ dialog. Som en följd utvecklades flera av de självgenererade analogierna till ett stort strukturellt djup. Samtidigt såg vi att vid skapande av egna analogier löper studenter risken att utveckla egna förklaringar av de studerade fenomenen som inte svarar mot dem inom vetenskapen eller snärja in sig i alltför komplexa jämförelser.