The Role of Visual Representations in Children's Learning about Biological Variability

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Biological variation is among the most important ideas in modern science. Variability among members of a species provides the foundation for theories of genetics, natural selection, and evolution. However, people typically underestimate the amount of variability that occurs within a species over the life span of animals and from one generation to the next. Children especially seem to have cognitive biases that members of a species are largely identical. To improve children's learning about biology, educators need better ways to scaffold children's understanding of biological variability. Diagrams and other visual representations are useful in promoting learning about biological variability, but diagrams can also be confusing. This project focuses on designing better visual representations of important types of variability, such as variability across life stages (e.g., in metamorphosis) and variability between parent and offspring (in genetic transmission). By studying how to make more effective visual representations, this project will inform efforts to improve science education, and will also provide information about the ways in which children's cognitive biases influence their scientific thinking more generally. This project is supported by an award to the University of Wisconsin by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program, which supports work that advances the fundamental research literature on STEM learning. To investigate how visual representations can be used to promote learning and transfer about biological variability, researchers in cognitive development and education will focus on two types of visual representations: life cycle diagrams and genetic diagrams. The research will investigate three key issues. First, 6- to 12-year-old children's beliefs about inheritance will be investigated to examine how strongly they expect consistency of traits from parent to offspring (i.e., in genetic transmission). Second, a series of studies will investigate how features of diagrams affect children's learning and transfer of knowledge about the life cycle and about genetic transmission. The studies will address whether highlighting generality, avoiding extraneous details, and highlighting variability in diagrams lead to optimal learning and transfer. To investigate these issues, lab-based experiments will be carried out that compare children's learning from visual representations that vary in targeted ways. The data analysis will address how children transfer their knowledge beyond the exemplars that are the focus of the learning tasks. Third, the results of Studies 1 and 2 will be used to inform the design of optimized diagrams, and the effects of these optimized diagrams on learning about biological change will be investigated during science workshops at a children's museum and during community-based science events using a pre-test - intervention - post-test design. This aspect of the research will also examine whether effective learning activities about within-species variability support children's reasoning about natural selection, evolution, and inheritance. The potential for broader impacts is substantial. Enabling children (and adults) to recognize different types of variability could have a significant impact on their biological thought and on the design of biology instruction. Better understanding of how specific visual features of diagrams contribute to or detract from science understanding may have important implications for the design and use of visual representations to convey scientific information in both formal and informal learning environments. This project also supports collaboration between science educators and researchers in cognitive development, providing training opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students. Results will be shared with academic researchers, and with educators in formal and informal science learning environments.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.