Assessing Competencies:Deciding when and what to represent


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Meta-Representational Competence

 

While it is important that students have the ability to move between representations and evaluate them for correctness, it is also important that they can make decisions about when and how they they should represent phenomenon. These decisions involve deciding what can be simplified and to what level. There are also a number of assumptions that are involved in deciding to represent phenomenon in a particular way.

 

  1. Students should be able to justify assumptions about what to model based on the phenomenon to be described.
  2. Students should be able to justify the simplifications that allow a phenomena to be modeled in a particular way.
  3. Students should be able to decide when the limits of a particular representation have been reached, and when another is required.
  4. Students should be able to devise a representation that will suit the needs of what they are trying to represent.