Traditionally, astronomy and physics have been viewed as difficult subjects to master. The movement from everyday conceptions of the world around us to a disciplinary interpretation is fraught with pitfalls and problems. What characterises a disciplinary insider’s discernment of phenomena in astronomy and how does it compare to the views of newcomers to the field? In this paper we report on a study into what students and professors discern (cf. Eriksson et al, in press) from the same disciplinary semiotic resource and use this to propose an Anatomy of Disciplinary Discernment (ADD) as an overarching characterization of disciplinary learning.

Students and professors in astronomy and physics were asked to describe what they could discern from a simulation video of travel through our Galaxy and beyond (Tully, 2012). In all, 137 people from nine countries participated. The descriptions were analysed using a hermeneutic, constant comparison approach (Seebohm, 2004; Strauss, 1987). Analysis culminated in the formulation of five hierarchically arranged, qualitatively different categories of discernment. This ADD modelling of the data consists of one non-disciplinary category and four levels of disciplinary discernment: Identification, Explanation, Appreciation, and Evaluation. Our analysis demonstrates a clear relationship between educational level and the level of disciplinary discernment.

The analytic outcomes of the study suggest that teachers may create more effective learning environments by explicitly crafting their teaching to support the discernment of various aspects of disciplinary semiotic resources in order to facilitate the crossing of boundaries in the ADD model.

Traditionally, physics has been viewed as a difficult subject to master. The movement from everyday conceptions of the world around us to a disciplinary interpretation is fraught with problems. What characterises this disciplinary development from learner to expert? In this presentation we report on a study involving what students and professors discern from a disciplinary representation and use this to propose an Anatomy of Disciplinary Discernment (ADD) as an overarching characterization of disciplinary learning. To do this we bring together three important educational ideas – first, Bruner’s (1960) notion of the spiral curriculum. Second, Fredlund, Airey, and Linder’s (2012) notion of disciplinary affordances -- the ‘inherent potential of a representation to provide access to disciplinary knowledge’. Thirdly Eriksson, Linder, Airey, and Redfors’ (2013) notion of disciplinary discernment -- noticing something (eg. Mason, 2002), reflecting on it (Schön, 1983), and constructing (disciplinary) meaning (Marton & Booth, 1997).

Students in astronomy and their teaching professors were asked to describe what they discerned from a simulation video of travel through our galaxy and beyond. In all, 137 people from nine countries participated. The descriptions were analysed using a standard interpretive study approach (Erickson, 1986; Gallagher, 1991). This resulted in the formulation of five qualitatively different categories of discernment.

We found that these categories of disciplinary discernment could be arranged into an anatomy of hierarchically increasing levels of disciplinary discernment and subsequently the idea of ADD with a unit of analysis being the discernment of disciplinary affordance. The ADD modelling for the data incorporated four increasing levels disciplinary discernment: Identification, Explanation, Appreciation, and Evaluation. The visualization of the analysis demonstrates a clear relationship between educational level and the level of disciplinary discernment. Hence, the ADD can be seen to be related to Bruner’s concept of the spiral curriculum idea and through this relationship projects a learning trajectory that students experience while moving through the educational system.

The analytic outcomes of the study suggest how teachers may gain insight into how to create more effective learning environments for students to successfully negotiate a required learning trajectory by explicitly crafting the teaching to support the crossing of boundaries.

Learning astronomy can be difficult for students at all levels due to the highly diverse, conceptual and theoretical thinking used in the discipline. A variety of disciplinary-specific representations are normally employed to help students learn about the Universe. Some of the most common representations are twodimensional (2D) such as diagrams, plots, or images. In astronomy education there is an implicit assumption that students will be able to con- ceptually extrapolate three-dimensional (3D) representations from these 2D images (e.g., of nebulae); however, this is often not the case (Hansen et al. 2004a,b; Molina et al. 2004; Williamson and Abraham 1995; N.R.C. 2006, p. 56). The way in which students interact with different disciplinary represen- tations determines how much and what they will learn; yet, our literature review indicates that not much is known about this interaction. We have therefore chosen to investigate students’ reflective awareness evoked by 3D representations. Reflective awareness relates to the learning affordances that engagement with a collection of representations facilitates. The notion of reflection is drawn from the work of Schön (cf. 1983) in that it is related to our learning experience and involves the noticing of ‘new things’ and the noticing of ‘things’ in new ways as part of dealing with puzzling phenomena. Much of the research into Astronomy Education Research (AER) has been carried out at pre-university levels (Bailey and Slater 2003; Bailey 2011; Bre- tones and Neto 2011; Lelliott and Rollnick 2010), and furthermore very little has been grounded in a disciplinary discourse perspective (Airey and Linder 2009). Our study sets out to address both of these shortcomings. Our research question is: What is the nature of university students’ re- flective awareness when engaging with the representations used to illustrate the structural components and characteristics of the Milky Way Galaxy in a simulation video? Although not common, when 3D is introduced, then this is often done using video simulations. For our study we chose to use a highly regarded video simulation that illustrates some of the fundamental structural components of our Universe in a virtual reality journey through, and out of, our galaxy. In the study, the first 1.5-minutes of the video was set to automatically pause in seven places (these places where optimally determined in a small pre-study), and a web questionnaire was created to elicit the participants’ reflective awareness about the structural components and characteristics of the Milky Way in each clip. A total of 137 participants from physics and astronomy in Europe, North America, South Africa and Australia took part in the study. The written reflective descriptions from the survey were coded and sorted into constructed categories, using a constant comparison approach (cf. Gibbs 2002; Strauss 1998). Many of the participants expressed poor prior awareness of the 3D struc- ture of the universe, as evidenced by their ‘surprise’ in observing 3D features such as the large separation of the stars in Orion or the two nebulae in Orion. Many were also surprised by the extent of the grand scale of the (local) Uni- verse as they realised that the journey covers great distances in only a few seconds. In contrast, those participants who rated themselves as astronomy experts had already developed a 3D awareness of the universe. They used much more complex descriptions and to some extent commented on struc- tures and phenomena omitted from the simulation, such as HI-regions and infrared radiation from HII-regions, although these are invisible to the naked eye. In this talk we report on 3D-related issues, which we will discuss in re- lation to implications for using such a simulation as a resource intended to enhance the possibility of learning. There are two main findings of our study concerning 3D: firstly, one of the clearest differences in reflective awareness to emerge was that there was a gradual increase of awareness of structures and phenomena in relation to the educational level of the astronomy partic- ipants. Interestingly, this is not the case for the physics participants and we will argue that this is due to differences in the disciplinary discourses of physics and astronomy. The second finding is that the use of the simulation video successfully stimulated participants’ awareness of the 3D structure of the Universe as seen in their expressed surprise. We therefore argue that simula- tions can be a powerful and necessary tool in helping develop an awareness of the three-dimensional Universe and that simulations therefore are one of the critical forms of representation that open up the space for learning in astronomy.

Learning astronomy is challenging at all levels due to the highly specialized form of communication used to share knowledge. When taking astronomy courses at different levels at university, learners are exposed to a variety of representations that are intended to help them learn about the structure and complexity of the Universe. However, not much is known about the reflective awareness that these representations evoke. Using a simulation video that provides a vivid virtual journey through our Milky Way galaxy, the nature of this awareness is captured and categorised for an array of learners (benchmark by results obtained for experts). The results illustrate how the number and nature of new things grounded in dimensionality, scale, time and perspective reflective awareness can too easily be taken for granted by both teachers and learners.