Student Representation Tasks: A Unique Fluency-Inspiring Activity

Our prior work investigating faculty-produced Think-Pair-Share questions led us to devise a curriculum development framework which can be used to guide the development of activities deliberately focused on increasing learners' discipline fluency. We apply this framework to develop Student Representation Tasks (SRTs), a brand new type of instructional activity in astronomy that transfers the responsibility for generating appropriate representations onto the learners. SRTs shift the learner’s cognitive load from interpreting to creating and are a dramatic pedagogical design choice informed by the theoretical perspective of social semiotics. We explicitly unpack and provide examples of SRTs, detailing their pedagogical power both in terms of the richness of the student learning experience fostered, and the discriminatory abilities these tasks offer the instructor with regard to revealing what has or has not been learned through prior instruction.