N. Sanjay Rebello

This multiple case study focused on the implementation of a computer-aided design (CAD) simulation to help students engage in engineering design to learn science concepts. Our findings describe three case studies that adopted the same learning design and adapted it to three different populations, settings, and classroom contexts: at the middle-school, high-school, and pre-service teaching levels. Although the classroom orchestration of the particular learning design was customised for specific audiences and contexts, findings from this study suggest that the core components of the learning design, such as content, assessment, and pedagogy, and their alignment among them, resulted in students’ learning. Specifically, results from a pre-post science assessment suggest that the three student groups arrived at similar understanding post-intervention levels, along with a significant aggregate growth in their scientific understanding. Regarding design performance, students in different groups demonstrated different levels of success in meeting design constraints. The findings also suggest that students’ success rate in meeting the design constraints directly influenced their final design performance, where middle-school students had better performance than students in the other groups. That is, across the board, students increased their conceptual understanding of heat transfer, Earth, and solar science and were able to produce feasible designs. Implications of the study include how learning experiences with engineering and science simulations should be designed so that teachers can adopt and adapt materials for their specific audiences, contexts, and settings.

Teaching-Learning Interviews to Understand and Remediate Student Difficulties with Fourier Series ConceptsAbstractLinear systems is a compulsory course in most electrical and computer engineering curricula. Itis widely perceived as useful but difficult, as it addresses subjects such as convolution, Fourierseries, and continuous/discrete Fourier transforms: higher-level concepts that rely on a well-developed understanding of lower-level mathematical constructs and procedures. Students withan inadequate mathematical foundation and a poor sense of the underlying systems theoryregularly struggle with such subjects, as they are typically able to perform sequences of theunderlying calculations but cannot piece together the higher conceptual relationships that drivethese procedures. As a result, many students are unable to address exam questions and analysisproblems that deviate from a solution recipe described in the textbook, and they often cannotexplain how slight changes in mathematical renderings will affect system or signal behavior.Teaching-learning interviews have been used in education to identify students’ conceptualweaknesses and to improve learning. This effort utilized teaching-learning interviews in a Spring2010 linear systems course to (a) identify the conceptual difficulties that students face whenstudying Fourier series and (b) improve students’ understanding of this topic. These interviewsattempted to focus more on higher-level Fourier series concepts (consistent with levels 4 through6 in Bloom’s taxonomy) and less on the procedural calculations and plotting (levels 1 through 3in Bloom’s taxonomy) in an effort to attempt to formalize assessment of this topic area relative toa well-established learning framework. Twenty eight students were interviewed for this studyusing a scripted protocol, where interview sessions lasted about one hour each. Conceptualstruggles were identified in thematic areas such as (a) the definition of the mathematical integraland its connections to signal average/behavior, (b) properties of even/odd functions and theirrelationship to the trigonometric basis set, and (c) the links between time shifts/inversion and theresulting phases of the contributing coefficients. The interview protocol, the sample questions,the conceptual misunderstandings related to Fourier series, and the learning assistance methodsutilized in the interviews are discussed in more detail in the paper.

Virtual learning environments can now be enriched not only with visual and auditory information, but also with tactile and kinesthetic feedback. However, the way to successfully integrate haptic feedback on a multimodal learning environment is still unclear. This study aims to provide guidelines on how visuohaptic simulations can be implemented effectively, thus the research question is: Under what conditions do visual and tactile information support students' development of conceptual learning of force‐related concepts? Participants comprised 170 undergraduate students of a Midwestern University enrolled in a physics for elementary education class. Four experiments were conducted using four different configurations of multimodal learning environments: Visual feedback only, haptic force feedback only, visual and haptic force feedback at the same time, and sequenced modality of haptic feedback first and visual feedback second. Our results suggest that haptic force feedback has the potential to enrich learning when compared with visual only environments. Also, haptic and visual modalities interact better when sequenced one after another rather than presented simultaneously. Finally, exposure to virtual learning environments enhanced by haptic forced feedback was a positive experience, but the ease of use and ease of interpretation was not so evident.

Recent research results have found that students using virtual manipulatives perform as well or better on measures of conceptual understanding than their peers who used physical equipment. We report on a study with students in a conceptual physics laboratory using either physical or virtual manipulatives to investigate forces in pulley systems. Written materials guided students through a sequence of activities designed to scaffold their understanding of force in pulley systems. The activity sequences facilitated students’ sense making by requiring them to make and test predictions about various pulley systems by building and comparing different systems. We investigate the ways in which students discuss force while navigating the scaffolding activities and how these discussions compare between the physical and virtual treatments.

We investigate the integration of argumentation in a physics course for future elementary teachers. Students were divided into two groups – construct and evaluate – to solve conceptual physics problems using corresponding forms of written argumentation. After training in small teams, each group received tasks that required transfer of skills to new problems requiring a different form of argumentation i.e. students trained to construct arguments were now required to evaluate arguments and vice versa. The process was repeated after three weeks during which more training was provided. Results indicate no significant improvement of argumentation on team training tasks over this period, but a statistically significant improvement on individual transfer tasks. Thus, three weeks of training did not improve students’ performance on the team tasks, but it prepared them to \transfer these skills to individual argumentation tasks.

Several reasons have been proposed to explain students' incorrect answers to conceptual physics problems. Heckler [3] proposed with a perceptual basis: plausible and salient "eye catching" features in a problem capture students' attention. Once students attend to these perceptually salient features, less salient albeit thematically relevant features are not considered and students answer the problem incorrectly based on the salient features. To test this hypothesis we recorded eye movements of introductory physics students on 15 conceptual problems with diagrams. Each diagram contained areas consistent with documented novice-like answers and other areas consistent with the scientifically correct answer. We manipulated the luminance contrast of the diagrams to produce three versions of each diagram, which differed by the area with the highest level of perceptual salience. We found no effect of the salience on the correctness of students' answers. We also discuss how the salience manipulations influence eye movements.

Previous studies have reported that students employed different problem solving approaches when presented with the same task structured with different representations. In this study, we explored and compared students’ strategies as they attempted tasks from two topical areas, kinematics and work. Our participants were 19 engineering students taking a calculus-based physics course. The tasks were presented in linguistic, graphical, and symbolic forms and requested either a qualitative solution or a value. The analysis was both qualitative and quantitative in nature focusing principally on the characteristics of the strategies employed as well as the underlying reasoning for their applications. A comparison was also made for the same student’s approach with the same kind of representation across the two topics. Additionally, the participants’ overall strategies across the different tasks, in each topic, were considered. On the whole, we found that the students prefer manipulating equations irrespective of the representational format of the task. They rarely recognized the applicability of a “qualitative” approach to solve the problem although they were aware of the concepts involved. Even when the students included visual representations in their solutions, they seldom used these representations in conjunction with the mathematical part of the problem. Additionally, the students were not consistent in their approach for interpreting and solving problems with the same kind of representation across the two topical areas. The representational format, level of prior knowledge, and familiarity with a topic appeared to influence their strategies, their written responses, and their ability to recognize qualitative ways to attempt a problem. The nature of the solution does not seem to impact the strategies employed to handle the problem.

We designed a sequence of seven lessons to facilitate learning of integration in a physics context. We implemented this sequence with a single college sophomore, “Amber,” who was concurrently enrolled in a first-semester calculus-based introductory physics course which covered topics in mechanics. We outline the philosophy underpinning these lessons, which characterizes integration in terms of layers and representations. We describe how Amber learned to give oral presentations in which she told a story about how integration comes from products, sums, and limits in a variety of physics contexts. We conclude that by the end of our lessons, Amber was able to conceptualize and explain integrals using multiple representations. In one case, she was able to solve a novel problem about integration in an unfamiliar context (center of mass.) Based on our previous research about integration, we suggest that these achievements would have been unattainable with the use of a single one or two hour lesson.

This study investigated how visual attention differed between those who correctly versus incorrectly answered introductory physics problems. We recorded eye movements of 24 individuals on six different conceptual physics problems where the necessary information to solve the problem was contained in a diagram. The problems also contained areas consistent with a novicelike response and areas of high perceptual salience. Participants ranged from those who had only taken one high school physics course to those who had completed a Physics Ph.D. We found that participants who answered correctly spent a higher percentage of time looking at the relevant areas of the diagram, and those who answered incorrectly spent a higher percentage of time looking in areas of the diagram consistent with a novicelike answer. Thus, when solving physics problems, top-down processing plays a key role in guiding visual selective attention either to thematically relevant areas or novicelike areas depending on the accuracy of a student’s physics knowledge. This result has implications for the use of visual cues to redirect individuals’ attention to relevant portions of the diagrams and may potentially influence the way they reason about these problems.

Recent research results have failed to support the conventionally held belief that students learn physics best from hands-on experiences with physical equipment. Rather, studies have found that students who perform similar experiments with computer simulations perform as well or better on measures of conceptual understanding than their peers who used physical equipment. In this study, we explored how university-level nonscience majors’ understanding of the physics concepts related to pulleys was supported by experimentation with real pulleys and a computer simulation of pulleys. We report that when students use one type of manipulative (physical or virtual), the comparison is influenced both by the concept studied and the timing of the post-test. Students performed similarly on questions related to force and mechanical advantage regardless of the type of equipment used. On the other hand, students who used the computer simulation performed better on questions related to work immediately after completing the activities; however, the two groups performed similarly on the work questions on a test given one week later. Additionally, both sequences of experimentation (physical-virtual and virtual-physical) equally supported students’ understanding of all of the concepts. These results suggest that both the concept learned and the stability of learning gains should continue to be explored to improve educators’ ability to select the best learning experience for a given topic.