Modelling physics teachers' pedagogical content knowledge through purposeful relationships between semiotic registers : KEPLER- knowlege environment for physics learning and evaluation of relationships

Constructivism and considers that learning is greatly influenced by collaboration between active learners. Although learning has this social dimension, the individual learner builds a personalised version of relevant concepts. Ideas in science are not communicated solely through written and spoken language. Use is made of different types of context-sensitive, semiotic register (e.g. diagrams, graphs and equations). The science teacher expands the set of such artefacts by introducing other types pertinent to teaching and learning. The full set may be used by collaborating learners for the purpose of concept development, problem solving and knowledge construction. It is argued that in science pedagogy such semiotic registers are not used in isolation, but are interrelated by a tutor for pedagogical purposes. The teacher may wish to highlight more semantically rich, localized areas on a semiotic and exploited for pedagogical purposes. Although the concept of purposeful relationships may be of relevance to knowledge-based systems in general, this work considers the framework of such relationships to be a component in a teacher's pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). By investigating a representation in software of such a framework belonging to an experienced teacher, it is envisaged that pre-service teachers may gain an insight into how subject knowledge may be structured for pedagogical purposes.