Teaching Effective Use of Diagrammatic Reasoning in Biology

研究人员建议开发和测试新的教学技术，旨在教高中理科学生如何使用生物教科书上出现的图表。来自一系列学科的研究表明，人们很难理解图表。研究人员先前发现，推理和其他高级过程对从文本中学习很重要，对从图表中学习更重要。他们进一步表明，学生在课本图表的内容理解方面几乎没有收获。研究人员将利用几种图解推理理论之间的共性来开发四种干预措施，遵循加法设计，旨在改善如何使用图表的课堂教学。在每次迭代中，一个额外的干预特性被添加到初始干预中。在第一次干预中，他们将教授图表的组成部分（例如，如何阅读标题、彩色键和图表的其他约定）。在第二部分，他们还将教授文字和图表的协调。第三，他们也会让学生进行自我解释。第四，他们还会让学生自己画图纸。与这些实验研究相结合，研究人员将收集一部分参与者在干预前后的眼动追踪数据，以寻找注视模式可能发生的变化。

The investigators propose to develop and test new instructional techniques aimed at teaching high-school science students how to use the diagrams that appear in their biology textbooks. Research from a range of disciplines has shown that people have difficulty making sense of diagrams. The investigators had previously found that inference and other high-level processes that are important for learning from text are even more important for learning from diagrams. They further showed that students show little gains in content understanding from textbook diagrams. The investigators will capitalize on commonalities among several theories of diagrammatic reasoning to develop four interventions, following an additive design, aimed at improving classroom instruction in how to use diagrams. In each iteration, one additional intervention feature is added to the initial intervention. In the first intervention, they will teach the components of diagrams (i.e., how to read captions, color keys, and other conventions of diagrams). In the second, they will also teach the coordinating of text and diagrams. In the third, they will also have the students engage in self-explanation. In the fourth, they will also have students construct their own drawings. In conjunction with these experimental studies, the investigators will collect eye tracking data on a subset of participants pre- and post-intervention in order to look for possible changes in gaze patterns.