Welcome to Jonte Bernhard's homepage!

With the words if Marcel Proust I welcome you to my homepage!

Educating students is one of my main commitments and for more than 30 years I have tried to learn students, on all levels from High School to Graduate School, insights into physics and electrical engineering. To improve student learning I have been responsible for several projects for educational development and curriculum design. More recently I also have been involved in courses and doctoral training in science and engineering education.

My career as a researcher started as an experimentalist studying magnetic materials and I obtained a PhD in Solid State Physics in 1987 and spent a year as postdoc at RIKEN in Japan. The commitment to insightful learning leed me into physics and engineering education research around 1995. My main interest is in student's learning in the laboratory and how "hands-on" approaches with real experiments can be combined with modern technologies such as computerbased measurement technologies, simulations and visualisations to get synergetic effects. My research has shown that this is possible with good learning outcomes, but that the pedagogical design is critical and that teacher involvement is important. With proper use of technologies these can serve as "new eyes". This research is an example of design-based educational research with benefit of improving education practice and beeing able to contribute to theory development at the same time. Contributions to theory are, for example, insights into critical conditions for student learning in the laboratory and development of a model for students' learning of a complex concept. I have been responsible for several with external funding and my recent projects is Investigating learning in engineering and in techno-science as a material discursive practice funded by the Swedish Research Council.