Collaborative Research: Improving Representational Competence by Engaging with Physical Modeling in Foundational STEM Courses

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This project is a collaboration between Whatcom Community College engineering and math faculty and Western Washington University psychology faculty. The project will investigate how to help students develop representational competence, a key skill needed for success in STEM fields. The project will design learning activities connected to physical models created by 3D printers and assess the impact of these activities on student learning. By creating 3D models that students can grasp in the hands, teachers may be able to help students learn key concepts in the classroom. If these 3D models help students gain skills in math and use those skills in other STEM courses, the students may be more likely to succeed and graduate. This project will test this 3D model approach and will help researchers understand how to best prepare engineering and other STEM students from a variety of backgrounds for STEM success. This project has the potential to increase both the number and diversity of STEM students who earn a degree and gain future employment in engineering and other high demand STEM fields. The project will share designs for the 3D models and related teaching material with other institutions. Teachers across the country will be able to add these tools to existing courses without the need to create new courses or change entire programs, creating a simple and efficient way to help STEM students learn better.A growing body of research indicates that well-developed spatial skills are prerequisite to the development of representational competence (i.e. the fluency with which a subject expert can move between different representations of a concept as appropriate for learning, communicating or problem solving). Additionally, it is known that these spatial skills can be improved through targeted training. With the advent of 3D printing technologies, faculty have a powerful tool readily available to develop physical models for learning activities that target specific learning goals. The project team will develop and assess physical modeling activities and supporting curriculum specifically designed to target development of representational competence. With three years of funding, this project proposes three goals: (1) Develop physical models and associated learning activities that embed practices thought to develop representational competence in multiple content areas in Statics and Integral Calculus; (2) Assess the effectiveness of the models and activities on improving representational competence in the context of traditional coursework in Statics and Integral Calculus; and (3) Identify the characteristics of modeling activities that make them effective for all learners and/or subgroups of learners. The project will develop replicable modeling curriculum for these classes with sets of activities and model designs. The project will also make available a rubric and taxonomy to classify various attributes of model-based learning activities, serving as a case study for applying this framework to other disciplines.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.