External mediation educational resources for teaching General Relativity: A systematic review

Modern and Contemporary Physics is an important component of civic education for senior high school students, as topics such as Relativity and Quantum Physics connect with everyday life and foster abstract thinking and critical skills. Yet, these themes are often absent from high school curricula. Among them, Einstein’s General Relativity Theory (GR) stands out: when presented, it usually sparks strong student interest. This paper aims to support GR teaching through a systematic literature review that identifies accessible resources for high school classrooms. The review is framed by the Cognitive Mediation Networks Theory (CMNT), focusing on its external mediation levels. Searches were conducted in ERIC, Scopus, Google Scholar, and SciELO, targeting studies reporting resources that are both accessible and manipulatable, enabling students’ external information processing. Thirty studies met the criteria, comprising resources across psychophysical (14), social (2), cultural (4), hypercultural (10), and sophotechnic (2) mediations. These ranged from physical models, analogies, and collaborative discussions to cultural artefacts, simulations, and AI chatbots. Some gaps were identified: several studies described GR resources without robust empirical testing, while others offered limited evaluation. This suggests that GR teaching at the high school level is still at an early stage. The review highlights the diversity of educational technologies available and their potential to expand students’ cognitive capacity through CMNT mediations. Although centred on a specific topic, the mediation-focused analysis proposed here offers a model for identifying effective instructional technologies applicable to teaching other complex theoretical concepts.