ROLE: Contexual Cues, Associative Memory and Learning of Physics

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In real world learning situations, a wide variety of contextual cues become associated with gradually formed common sense knowledge. In contrast, school learning often emphasizes abstract symbolic manipulations, which can lead to students' difficulties in applying their knowledge to real world examples. To help students make intuitive sense of physics, it is necessary to address sensory stimuli that are explicitly or implicitly associated with students' common sense knowledge from experience. To do this, it is important to understand what contextual cues are involved in learning and how they affect the learning process. For selected topics in introductory physics, we will conduct systematic qualitative studies to identify and investigate specific context cues that affect students' learning; we will develop methods to measure, evaluate and represent the involvement of context cues in different stages of learning; we will also develop physics activities in virtual environments to investigate experimentally how low-level sensory cues such as haptic feedback affect learning and how such cues may be addressed in instruction.The resulting insights into the interplay between context and learning, and integration of contextual and sensory information into virtual environments will broaden the horizon of active engagement teaching methods and inform the development of teaching technologies.