CAREER: How Many Intuitive Physics Systems are There, and What Do They Mean for Physics Education

理解儿童如何学习物理概念的基础研究在几个不同的学科(认知心理学、发展科学和物理教育研究)中相对独立地进行，每一个学科都得出了非常不同的结论。一份研究文献表明，人们在接受教育之前对机械物理的直觉在很大程度上是真实的，另一篇文献表明，这些直觉在很大程度上是不正确的，还有一篇文献表明，这些直觉在婴儿期是不正确的，但在重要的物理教育之前就已经是真实的了。这些看似相互矛盾的发现使教育干预的发展复杂化，因为一项研究建议的干预措施被另一项研究禁止。这个项目的首要目标是开始综合和协调这些不同的工作。该项目本质上是跨学科的，并将依赖于新的和新兴的方法来进行稳健和可重复的研究，如自动化在线测试、公民科学和高级分析。这类工具在人类研究中越来越重要，但对学生的培训相对较少。因此，这一职业项目的教育部分将侧重于加强此类培训，包括更新一本关于计算建模和分析的创新、互动教科书，开发和运行公民科学暑期强化培训计划，以及为本科生提供直接的动手教育。该项目是由EDU核心研究(ECR)计划资助的职业奖项，该计划支持推进STEM学习、扩大参与和劳动力发展的基础研究文献的工作。许多研究文献都对机械物理的直觉理解的性质提出了质疑，但它们往往支持不一致的结论，从而使它们对基本认知结构的表征以及教育干预设计的影响是模糊的。此外，由于这些结论来自不同的学科团体使用不同的方法研究不同的人群，目前尚不清楚这些差异是反映了人们在不同情况下对不同物理过程的思考方式的真正差异，还是仅仅是人为的。这个项目的目标1将应用心理物理学的工具来测试这些文献中开发的一系列任务的可靠性，试图确定不同的表现(如果有的话)是否暗示着多个潜在的认知系统。目标2将使用发展心理学的工具来研究儿童在改编自一系列文献的任务上的年龄相关差异，以了解发展科学家观察到的发展模式是否具有他们的方法的特殊性。目标3将调查在这些学科中发展的衡量标准是否能不同地预测学生在大学物理入门课程中的成功。因此，这三个目标将系统地评估和比较目前分离的文献所共有的刺激、任务和研究方法，允许直接比较和综合，研究对象从6个月到成年人不等。所有这三个目标都将涉及异常大和多样化的样本-通常通过利用自动在线测试和公民科学--以及先进的分析。通过尝试协调这些相对分散的文献，该项目将有可能为不同年龄段物理教育干预的发展做出贡献。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Basic research into understanding how children learn physics concepts has been pursued relatively independently in several different disciplines (cognitive psychology, developmental science, and physics education research), each of which has come to very different conclusions. One research literature suggests that people's pre-educational intuitions about mechanical physics are largely veridical, another literature suggests that these intuitions are largely incorrect, and yet another suggests that they are incorrect in infancy but become veridical even before significant physics education. These seemingly contradictory findings complicate the development of educational interventions, since interventions suggested by one line of research are contraindicated by others. The overarching goal of this project is to start synthesizing and reconciling these different lines of work. The project is inherently interdisciplinary and will depend on new and emerging methods for robust and reproducible research such as automated online testing, citizen science, and advanced analytics. Such tools are increasingly important in human research but relatively little training in them for students is available. Thus, the educational component of this CAREER project will focus on enhancing such training and includes updating an innovative, interactive textbook on computational modeling and analysis, developing and running an intensive summer training program for citizen science; and providing undergraduates with direct, hands-on education. The project is funded as a CAREER award by the EDU Core Research (ECR) program, which supports work that advances the fundamental research literatures on STEM learning, broadening participation, and workforce development. Multiple research literatures have engaged questions about the nature of intuitive understandings of mechanical physics, but they have often supported discrepant conclusions, thereby making ambiguous what their implications are for the characterization of fundamental cognitive architecture as well as for the design of educational interventions. Moreover, because these conclusions arise from different disciplinary communities studying different populations using different methods, it is not clear whether these discrepancies reflect real differences in how people think about different physical processes in different situations or whether they are simply artifactual. Objective 1 of this project will apply the tools of psychophysics in order to test the reliability of a range of tasks developed in these literatures in an attempt to determine whether differential performance (if any) suggests multiple underlying cognitive systems. Objective 2 will use the tools of developmental psychology to study age-related differences in children on tasks adapted from the range of literatures to see whether the developmental patterns observed by developmental scientists are specific to their methods. Objective 3 will investigate whether the measures developed in these disciplines differentially predict student success in introductory university physics. Thus, the three objectives will systematically assess and compare the stimuli, tasks, and research methods common to the currently-disjoint literatures, allowing for direct comparison and synthesis, with subjects ranging in age from 6 months to adults. All three objectives will involve unusually large and diverse samples --- often by utilizing automated online testing and citizen science -- and advanced analytics. By attempting to reconcile these relatively disjoint literatures, the project will have the potential to contribute to the development of educational interventions in physics at a variety of ages.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.