Visual chunking as a strategy for spatial thinking in STEM
Visual chunking as a strategy for spatial thinking in STEM
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DOI：
10.1186/s41235-020-00217-6
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发表时间：
2020-04-18
影响因子：
4.1
通讯作者：
Hegarty, Mary
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Stieff, Mike;Werner, Stephanie;Hegarty, Mary
众所周知，工作记忆容量可以预测新手和专家在STEM（科学，技术，工程和数学）中发现的各种任务上的表现。STEM任务的一个共同特征是，它们要求问题解决者编码和转换学科表征中描述的复杂空间信息，这些信息似乎超过了视觉空间工作记忆的已知容量限制。了解这些限制以及STEM学习者如何以不同的方式编码和转换视觉空间信息，为解决学生在浏览STEM课程和学位课程时面临的挑战提供了新的途径。在这里，我们描述了两项研究，探讨学生在检测颜色变化的视觉刺激化学学科的准确性。我们表明，天真和新手化学学生的视觉空间信息的编码是如何影响信息的视觉结构在“块”普遍在化学表征。在这两项研究中，我们表明，学生更准确地检测化学相关块内的颜色变化相比，发生在他们之外的变化，但性能不受结构的维度（2D与3D）或冗余的视觉表示的存在。这些研究支持的假设，组块的信息空间结构的策略可能是关键的工具，超越否则严重有限的视觉空间能力，在缺乏专业知识。
Working memory capacity is known to predict the performance of novices and experts on a variety of tasks found in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). A common feature of STEM tasks is that they require the problem solver to encode and transform complex spatial information depicted in disciplinary representations that seemingly exceed the known capacity limits of visuospatial working memory. Understanding these limits and how visuospatial information is encoded and transformed differently by STEM learners presents new avenues for addressing the challenges students face while navigating STEM classes and degree programs. Here, we describe two studies that explore student accuracy at detecting color changes in visual stimuli from the discipline of chemistry. We demonstrate that both naive and novice chemistry students' encoding of visuospatial information is affected by how information is visually structured in "chunks" prevalent across chemistry representations. In both studies we show that students are more accurate at detecting color changes within chemistry-relevant chunks compared to changes that occur outside of them, but performance was not affected by the dimensionality of the structure (2D vs 3D) or the presence of redundancies in the visual representation. These studies support the hypothesis that strategies for chunking the spatial structure of information may be critical tools for transcending otherwise severely limited visuospatial capacity in the absence of expertise.