Drama i kemisalen : En designbaserad studie av hur kreativt drama kan stödja gymnasieelevers lärande av kemisk bindning

Sammanfattning: A major challenge for chemistry education is to develop the students' understanding of chemical bonding. In upper-secondary school, the challenges are commonly expressed as difficulties for students to distinguish between intra and intermolecular bonding and to understand chemical bonding in terms of electronegativity. The aim of this thesis is to investigate in what ways creative drama can support the students' learning of non-spontaneous chemical concepts related to electronegativity and chemical bonding. Drama has previously been suggested to support science learning, but studies in science education are limited and the potential of using drama to afford student theoretical reasoning in chemistry needs further scrutiny and design development. In the study which forms the basis of the thesis, socio-cultural theory of learning is combined with multimodal social semiotic analysis. The study was conducted as a design-based study with interventions in three cycles in two schools. The interventions, including the drama activity and students group discussions before and after, were video-and audiotaped. In Article 1, data from cycle 2 was analyzed with respect to what kind of semiotic work students were engaged in. In Article 2, the data from cycles 1, 2 and 3 were analyzed on the basis of thematic content analysis resulting in themes regarding in what ways the students explored electronegativity and chemical bonding and in what ways creative drama afforded collective student agency. The main findings point to the importance of meaning-making through transduction to develop students' conceptual understanding of chemical bonding. In the students' semiotic work, it was possible to create relations between electronegativity and the polarity of molecules and to link the polarity of the molecules to intermolecular bonding in the collective whole class interaction, which in turn is a prerequisite for understanding phase changes. The interaction between the student groups was pivotal for linking the chemistry's sub-micro and macro levels. Further, the results show that the students' bodily formations of molecules in certain groups prompted semiotic work in other groups, which got consequences for the students’ collective agency. The visualization of the students' bodily formations created opportunities for students to pay attention to differences in representations of chemical bonding. A notion called epistemic dissonance is introduced to account for the emergent epistemic tensions/contradictions that become recognized by the students in the creative drama. Emergent epistemic dissonances constitute opportunities for collective work concerning the conceptual relations where students act as learning resources for oneanother. This thesis points to the importance of designing creative drama in such ways that both the material and social structure may support the students' collective agency.