Representation

• In Event: New International Developments and Cross-Validation in Constructive Knowledge Assessment and Rerepresentation

Abstract

The notion of representation plays an essential role for theories of learning and teaching. Without the notion of representation it seems impossible to describe how human beings are able to learn und to communicate. To answer empirical questions about creating and using representations you need a detailed analysis of the notion of representation and its functional and ontological importance. A clarification of the notion of representation is needed for several reasons.
(1) Disambiguation. On the one hand one should be able to discriminate the notion of a representation from related ideas like: a pure perception, an immediate experience, a model of something or a base of knowledge.
(2) Categorizations. One the other hand one should distinguish between several kinds of representations, most importantly, the difference between internal (mental) and external representations. A ‘mental representation’ is a theoretical construct to explain ongoing information processing in the human brain. Whereas an external representation is to be found in the world and is used as a stand-in for something else, such as written paper in an exam may stand-in for the tested knowledge. In particular, the conceptual distinction of external and internal representations is crucial to educational studies. A student must be able to transform internal representations into external ones in order to provide evidence of successful learning.
(3) Levels of descriptions. Common features of all kinds of representations are following four components:
the vehicle (the medium, the representation itself), the representandum with semantic properties (the content, the referred-to object), the subject (having /using the representation), and the triadic relation between those components. If a subject is employing a mental representation, the representandum is realized by the vehicle and provides information for the subject.
(4) Functional features. Mental representations can be explained either by a causal theory or by a theory of structural similarities and in both cases the representandum has semantic properties. If, in case of a causal explanation, the stimuli are only represented in a deficit manner or if the stimulus is lacking at all we talk of misrepresentations. Besides questions about criteria for representations, questions about how to operate on those representations are of equal importance.
The pure having of representation alone does not help that much, you have to be able to search, to sort, to generalize etc. to acquire the ability to solve problems and to learn. To say it in a nutshell, after creating a representation in your head you have to be able to get it out again.

Author

• Anna Strasser, Humboldt University - Berlin