Learning Internal Visualization Skills for Complex Engineering Concepts in Active Learning Classes

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With support from the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program: Education and Human Resources (IUSE:EHR), this project aims to serve the national interest by improving engineering students' ability to understand graphs and other visual representations. Engineering instructors often use visual representations, such as Cartesian and polar coordinate graphs, to help students learn. However, these visualizations can be confusing to students unless they know how the visualizations show information. This project will use an intelligent tutoring system to help students learn how particular visual features show specific foundational engineering concepts. It will also target student fluency in understanding visual representations, akin to fluency in a language. The intelligent tutorial system will also train students to imagine the visuals when they are no longer present. It is expected that these "internal" visualization skills will help students learn more easily from text and equations. Experiments will investigate which supports lead to most improvement in students' internal visualization skills and content learning. The experiments will be carried out in situations in which students learn individually and collaboratively, allowing the project team to establish which aspects of visual representations are best learned alone and which are best learned in a team. Such understanding is important for understanding the limits and maximizing the effectiveness of active learning classes.Internal visualization skills enhance learning when the visual representations are subsequently replaced by abstract equations. Two critical knowledge gaps will be addressed in the project: i) how best to support representational competencies in a way that enhances internal visualization skills; ii) how to effectively support representational competencies for both individual and collaborative activities, the latter being increasingly important in active learning. The project will provide new insights into how instruction can help students benefit from visual representation. Although the project focuses on the learning of foundational engineering concepts, it may yield results that inform the development of educational technology resources for other disciplines. The project will lead to an innovative educational technology resource that provides support for individual and collaborative learning with visuals, which may enhance students' success in STEM. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the IUSE program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.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.