Olivia Levrini

Department Affiliation: Ph.D., Department of Physics, University of Bologna, Italy

Email: olivia (dot) levrini2 (at) unibo (dot) it

Web-site:

Research Interests:

educational reconstruction of physics,

conceptual change,

teacher education,

curriculum development,

role of history and philosophy in teaching/understanding physics

Current work:

My current work is designing a model of Prospective Teaching “Corridors” (PTC) (Confrey, 2006): conceptual spaces (i) able to outline a wide, coherent perspective, where short, medium, long term conceptual paths on Physics can be situated; (ii) suitable to be navigated by teachers and students along different trajectories according to different school contexts and different teachers’ cultural aims; (iii) able to support, along the different school-levels and across the different subject matters, knowledge evolution as a progressively expanding process aimed to extend, re-invest or revise explicitly interpretative formal structures and models when enlargements and/or changes of the phenomenological basis are enacted or when explanatory schemes clash with each other in border problems.

For this purpose the Research Group of Bologna is working on comparing three different Models: (1) the Model of Longitudinal Development elaborated within the Italian Project called F21 (coordinated by P. Guidoni) which points out criteria for coherence and crucial steps that allow the cognitive potential of the pupils to be progressively exploited and tuned to the construction of Physics knowledge along the pre-university curriculum; (2) the Model of Coordination Classes designed by A.A. diSessa (GSE, University of California, Berkeley), for interpreting the processes involved in conceptual change and learning in physics; (3) the Model of Discipline-Culture designed by I. Galili (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), as a model of physics knowledge organization based on an explicit view of physics as culture.

Selected KiP-related publications:

- Levrini O., diSessa A.A. (2008), How Students Learn from Multiple Contexts and Definitions: Proper Time as a Coordination Class, Physical Review Special Topics - Physics Education Research 4, 010107.