seminar
update: 11-15-2003

On this page, we announce and make available information pertaining to different seminar (series) pertaining to research and publication. Research-fucsed seminars are part of the Faculty's effort to increase the visibility of research in the faculty and to provide faculty members and graduate students with opportunties to produce and reproduce a research culture.

upcoming seminars

TITLE: Layered Inscriptions: Do They Bridge the Gap between World and Language?
JaeYoung Han, Wolff-Michael Roth, and Lilian Pozzer-Ardenghi
ABSTRACT: Inscriptions have been the central mediating element in the development of science. They also figure prominently in school science textbooks. However, research suggests that students do not easily understand inscriptions. This may be due to the gap between them and the things in the world that they stand for, which requires tremendous work of the reader. There have been suggestions that overlaying an experience-distant inscription with one that is closer to everyday experience will help students learn. The purpose of this study was to investigate the function of layered inscriptions in middle school science textbooks, which we found to occur 20 and 24 percent of inscriptions in Korean and North American science textbooks, respectively. In this study, we develop a semantic model that allows us to describe the work of reading and interpreting layered inscriptions. Our analyses of several layered inscriptions articulates the tremendous amount of work that needs to be done to establish the links between the layered inscriptions, and between the inscriptions and the world familiar to the student. In addition, different functional relations in layered inscription require different kind and amount of linking work. Our study shows that although layered inscriptions decrease the gaps between more experience-distant inscriptions and the world of experience, the total number of different types of work (structuring, transposing, and translating) to be done and aligned increases. Our study provides a framework for studying how students learn from using inscriptions in general and layered inscriptions in particular.
Layered inscriptions