Cognitive Science Principles

1. Cognitive Science Principles Contrasting Cases Visualizations Prior Knowledge & Misconceptions Spaced Rehearsal & Assessment

2. Contrasting Cases • Learning from two (or several) cases that are simultaneously compared and contrasted • Helps students understand abstract features and structural relations rather than focusing too much on the superficial aspects of individual examples • Comparison can be very informative to learners even when the cases being compared are new and not well-understood • Cases are especially effective when they come at the beginning of instruction

3. Visualizations • Textbooks are full of diagrams, graphs, photographs, etc. which are meant to add crucial information to the written text • Students often ignore them or do not know how to interpret them effectively • Conventions are often implicit or not clearly indicated • Visualization activities help students attend to and interpret different image types, relative scale & magnification, perspective, use of color & other conventions, captions, etc.

4. Prior knowledge is one of the strongest predictors of future learning. How well does a student’s prior knowledge fit with new learning? • Have a well-developed, accessible framework • Lack a relevant conceptual framework (no foundation) • Have an incomplete or inaccurate conceptual framework (partial or weak fit) • Have a strong misconception (active conflict)

5. Spaced Testing • Revisiting material helps students remember it longer • Activating prior knowledge makes it easier to prepare for and connect to new knowledge • Well-designed test items can be more effective for learning than further review or practice • Modifications include daily warm-ups, weekly short assessments, and end of unit tests to put these principles into practice

6. Contrasting Cases • A simple example of the power of having multiple cases • Comparison helps highlight similarities and differences between cases – focus on particular features Medin, Goldstone, and Gentner, (1993). Respects for similarity. Psychological Review, 100, 254-278.

7. Contrasting Cases • Comparing cases ismore effective than studying them individually • Timing of the contrasting cases. In most textbooks cases are usually placed as homework at the end of a unit of study. • Research has found that case comparison should be done before principles are introduced • Domain: students learning memory concepts • Comparison: analyzing contrasting cases vs. reading a summary of the cases • Hypothesis: students given a chance to compare cases will learn deeply from a lecture than those who read a summary of the case data Schwartz & Bransford, (1998). Time for telling. Cognition and Instruction, 16, 475-522.

8. Contrasting Cases • Design Treatment A Compare cases Treatment C Compare cases Treatment B Read case summary Common Learning Experience Listen to a lecture Compare cases again Target Transfer Task Predictions about a novel memory experiment Schwartz & Bransford, (1998). Time for telling. Cognition and Instruction, 16, 475-522.

9. Contrasting Cases Compare cases + Lecture Summarize + Lecture Compare cases twice Schwartz & Bransford, (1998). Time for telling. Cognition and Instruction, 16, 475-522.

10. Visualizations They are unable to follow the arrows, captions and labels in complex diagramsHegarty, Kriz, & Cate, 2003

11. Visualizations • Students often fail to make the most of images they come across in curricula (lacking interpretation skills)Berthold & Renkl, 2009 • When students do not understand the diagrams they can come away with misconceptions • They might then skip diagrams to avoid further frustrationBartholome & Bromme, 2009

12. Visualizations are common in the classroom… • In American 8th grade classrooms diagrams are used at least once in 52% of lessons and concept maps in 46% of lessons. In 21% of all lessons observed, students made their own diagrams (K. J. Roth et al., 2006).

13. … and Visualizations are common in textbooks • Middle school through undergraduate textbooks have >1 image per page, average1-4 features per image such as captions, labels, arrows, abbreviations, etc. (Cromley, Snyder & Luciw)

14. Visualizations • Middle school science textbooks often have very complex diagrams

15. Visualizations • We focus on the following • Diagram versus Real Image • Labeling • Captions • Relative scale and magnification • Colors • Cut-away

16. Prior Knowledge & Misconceptions • Research shows one of the strongest predictors of learning is related to what the student already knows(NRC, 1999, 2006) • If the to-be-learned information matches with the organization and framework of the students’ prior knowledge learning is smooth and rapid • Unfortunately, not the case in science learning; students lack the proper conceptual frameworks for learning many new concepts

17. Prior Knowledge & Misconceptions • Much of earth sciences involves learning about entities and processes at a macroscopic level • Challenges of representing dynamic processes over long time scales and large 3-D spaces. • Students have trouble understanding geologic time scales • Geologic processes don’t make sense in short scales • Students have trouble representing 3-D structures • Earth science evidence is frequently 3-D, but pictures are 2-D • Students have trouble reasoning across spatial scales • Rock features are small, formations are large • Students need to add new concepts and explanatory systems to learn new concepts

18. Prior Knowledge & Misconceptions • Many well-documented misconceptions • The geologic world is inert and unchanging. • Geology happened long ago and far away. • Object kind vs. material kind • Etc. • Misconceptions tend to be entrenched in students’ thinking and resistant to change • It’s important to be aware of them and that teaching and learning activities emphasize the correct concepts • Countering misconceptions is generally a long, gradual, process, in which a new causal / explanatory concept is constructed and applied repeatedly

19. Conceptual Challenges in Earth History Distinctive attributes of Geoscience as an “interpretive and historical science”: involves large-scale datasets that are often incomplete involves making “predictions” about the past involves synthesis of different kinds of systems and data types

20. Distinctive Attributes of Geoscience • Holistic systems thinking: cycles and interactions among major earth systems (e.g., air, water, ice, rock, living things), feedback loops • Phenomena involve very large scales for time and space • High demands on visual representation and three-dimensional spatial thinking • Variety of methodologies and measurements

21. Conceptual Challenges for Students • The Earth is static and unchanging (except for the weather) • Geology happened “long ago and far away” (vs. geologic processes and events are occurring all around us all the time) • Cumulative effects of VERY LONG time scales are underestimated or disregarded, especially for gradual processes (e.g., deposition, erosion) • Rock cycle: rocks, which seem very permanent to kids, change “kinds,” are created and broken down. • Magnitudes of time, pressure, temperature, and systems are far beyond everyday experience

22. Spaced Testing • Why do students forget what they have been taught so quickly? • Research has shown that forgetting can be dramatically reduced by occasionally revisiting old concepts in later tests(Rohrer & Pashler, 2007) • Spaced testing - where the test is spaced out over time instead of being massed • Repeated testing is better than re-study, or a lecturing again, even controlling for the same amount of time(Roediger & Karpicke, 2006)

23. Spaced Testing