Coupling Ray Diagrams and Real World Phenomena in Optics

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This project builds on previous research by physics educators and cognitive scientists and addresses an important instructional problem in science teaching: how to facilitate the process by which students learn to connect real world phenomena with scientific representations of the phenomena. The domain of focus is geometrical optics and the main population of interest consists of pre-service elementary school teachers. The project activities cover two major areas. The investigations: (1) will develop a general template which will be used for specifying an individuals's mental model about optical phenomena. The template will be used to describe how the physics expert's and students' mental models differ, and also to describe changes in a student's mental model during various phases of instruction. (2) will develop and investigate the effectiveness of an instructional strategy, based upon the psychological principle of simultaneous encoding of information, to facilitate students' ability to connect ray diagrams and optical phenomena. In this strategy ray diagram representations will be simultaneously presented with the visual demonstration of the related optical phenomenon. Finally, the investigators will develop a videodisc with a myriad of examples of optical phenomena, and will use the text and graphics overlay capabilities of a computer videodisc system to implement the instructional strategy.