Bruce L Sherin

Professor Sherin’s work focuses primarily on conceptual change in science—the process through which our everyday understanding of the natural world changes over time and with instruction. In early work, he engaged in the design and study of novel interventions for physics instruction, with particular emphasis on the role of symbolic representations. As part of that work, he explicated his theory of Symbolic Forms, which captures the conceptual structures that successful physics experts learn to see in equations. More recently, his work has focused on some methodological issues in the study of conceptual change. As part of this newer work, he applies techniques from natural language processing to interview protocols. He is also the designer and developer of Tactic Text, which is a web-based text mining environment designed for qualitative data analysts.