Embodied Physics Learning

本EHR核心研究项目的目标是利用具身认知的认知科学理论来增强学生在物理方面的学习，重点关注STEM学习领域。正在研究的一个中心假设是，为学生提供物理量的直接经验（例如，通过设计平衡技术来定位物体的重心，感受物体的质量分布），而不是阅读教科书中的概念或使用更传统的实践活动（例如，从一个扩展的物体上悬挂重物，以直观地确定物体的重心），可以提高学习效果。当学生在实验中感受到物理量时，当他们思考和推理他们所经历的物理概念时，可能会导致大脑中专门负责感觉运动处理的区域的增加。当这些感觉运动区域参与思考和推理时，人们对相关概念的理解可能会提高。在认知科学实验室中，实验1-4研究了通过平衡活动与物理对象的直接接触是否以及如何促进扩展对象作为离散组件的概念化，从而增强学生定位系统COG的能力。实验5、6、8和9转移到物理教室，探索感觉运动体验如何与理解COG主题相关，改善常见的误解，并确定感觉运动体验的最佳时间（相对于讲课时间）。实验7使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）范式探讨了驱动经验和理解之间联系的认知和神经基础。总的来说，这项工作旨在揭示某些实验室经验如何以及为什么有效，促进易于实施的指导方针的设计，教育工作者可以在自己的课程中使用这些指导方针来增强学生的学习。

The goal of this EHR Core Research project, focused on the area of STEM learning, is to use cognitive science theories of embodied cognition to enhance student learning in physics. A central hypothesis being investigated is that providing students with direct experience with physics quantities (e.g., feeling the mass distribution in an extended object through balancing techniques designed to locate an object's center of gravity (COG)), as opposed to reading about the concepts in a textbook or using more traditional hands-on activities (e.g., hanging weights from an extended object to visually determine an object's COG), enhances learning. Laboratory experiences where students feel physics quantities may lead to the recruitment of brain areas devoted to sensorimotor processing when students later think and reason about the physics concepts they experienced. When these sensorimotor areas are involved in thinking and reasoning, people's understanding of the concepts in question may improve. In the cognitive science laboratory, experiments 1-4 investigate whether and how direct engagement with physical objects through balancing activities can promote the conceptualization of extended objects as discrete components, thus enhancing students' ability to locate a system's COG. Experiments 5, 6, 8, & 9 move to the physics classroom to explore how sensorimotor experience may relate to understanding the COG topic and ameliorate common misconceptions, and to determine the optimal time (relative to lecture) for sensorimotor experience. Experiment 7 explores the cognitive and neural substrates driving the link between experience and understanding using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm. Overall, this work seeks to uncover how and why certain laboratory experiences are effective, facilitating the design of easy-to-implement guidelines that educators can use in their own courses to enhance student learning.