Explorations of University Physics in Abstract Contexts : From de Sitter Space to Learning Space
Abstract (Summary)
This is a thesis which contributes to research in two different fields: theoretical physics and physics education research. The common link between these two research areas is that both involve explorations of abstract physics and mathematical representations, but from different perspectives.The first part of this thesis is situated in theoretical physics. Here a cosmological scenario is explored where a de Sitter phase is replaced with a phase described with a scale factor a(t) ~ tq, where 1/3