Collaborative Research: Effects of instructional analogies on illusions of understanding in Introductory Geoscience

类比在地质学和其他STEM领域的教科书和其他教材中随处可见。“地壳就像一个多层蛋糕，上面有许多不同颜色的糖衣。”这是一个用于教授地质学的类比例子。类比被广泛认为是有效的教学工具，因为它们将学生已经熟悉的东西与一个新的不熟悉的概念联系起来。但同样的特征可能会导致理解的错觉。学生们可能会认为，如果他们理解了熟悉的东西（分层蛋糕），他们就理解了他们需要学习的不熟悉的东西（地壳中的地层）。相比之下，科学概念可能要复杂得多，具有简单、熟悉的物体所不具备的特征。如果类比的限制没有为学生详细说明，他们可能会对自己的知识过于自信，而不能付出充分理解所需要的额外努力。这将是元理解中的一个错误，它会破坏自我调节的学习行为。目前的项目将研究如何在本科地质学入门课程中使用类比，以探索它们对学生对自己知识判断的准确性的潜在负面影响，并开发旨在消除或减少这种负面影响的课程。研究结果的影响将超出地质领域，因为类比是STEM领域学习环境的一个普遍方面。当前的项目将包括系统分析如何在广泛采用的地质学教学资源中使用类比，还将包括在本科地球科学入门课堂上进行的一系列实验，其学生主要是大学一年级和二年级。实验使用的所有材料均为真实的课堂材料，充分融入课程的在线作业活动。这些实验的基本程序是，学生将阅读关于地球科学各个主题的教科书节选，这些主题是否包含类比，系统地有所不同。在学习完所有主题后，学生将被要求判断他们对每个主题的理解程度（“在一个5题的测试中，你认为你能答对多少题？”）并被要求确定他们会选择重新学习哪些主题。然后，学生们将对每个主题进行理解测试，这需要推理，而不仅仅是记忆单词。这个过程可以计算学生对自己的理解（即元理解）的判断有多准确，他们是否选择重新学习他们最需要学习的主题，以及他们对每个主题的实际理解程度。学生在课程考试中的表现将被用作衡量影响的更长远的指标。除了类比对每个结果测量的影响之外，一些实验将测试类比的影响是否可以通过让学生绘制地质现象的草图来缓和，并通过一个简短的在线教程来测试如何在熟悉的来源和不熟悉的目标概念之间进行映射，以及警告以避免由于类比来源熟悉而可能出现的膨胀的信心。除了改善STEM教学外，研究结果还将有可能推动在元理解、科学学习和使用类比来传达STEM中复杂概念方面的更广泛的文献。本项目由EDU核心研究（ECR）项目支持。ECR强调在STEM领域产生基础知识的基础教育研究。投资在至关重要、广泛和持久的关键领域：STEM学习和STEM学习环境，扩大STEM参与，以及STEM劳动力发展。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Analogies pervade textbooks and other teaching materials in geology and other STEM fields. "The Earth's crust is like a multi-layered cake with many different colors of icing." This is an example of an analogy used to teach geology. Anaologies are widely thought to be effective teaching tools because they take something that students are already familiar with and relate it to a new unfamiliar concept. But this same feature could potentially lead to illusions of understanding. Students may assume that if they understand the familiar thing (layered cake) they understand what they need to learn about the unfamiliar thing (strata in the Earth's crust). In contrast, the scientific concept may be far more complex and possess features that the simple, familiar object does not. If the limits of the analogy are not detailed for the student, they may become overconfident in their knowledge and fail to put forth the additional effort needed for full understanding. This would be an error in metacomprehension that undermines self-regulated learning behaviors. The current project will study how analogies are used in undergraduate Introductory Geology to explore their potential negative impact on the accuracy of students' judgments about their own knowledge and to develop lessons aimed at eliminating or reducing this negative impact. The results will have implications beyond the field of geology, as analogies are a pervasive aspect of learning environments across STEM fields.The current project will involve a systemic analysis of how analogies are used in widely adopted instructional resources in Geology and will also include a series of experiments to be conducted within undergraduate Introductory Geoscience classrooms whose students are primarily college freshman and sophomores. All materials used for the experiments will be authentic classroom materials, fully integrated into the courses' online homework activities. The basic procedure common to these experiments is that students will read textbook excerpts on various topics in geoscience that systematically vary in whether they include analogies. After studying all topics, students will be asked to judge their level of comprehension for each topic ("How many items do you think you will get correct on a 5-item test?") and asked to identify which topics they would choose to restudy. Students will then take a comprehension test for each topic that requires inferential reasoning rather than just memory for words. This procedure allows for computing how accurate students are in their judgments of their own comprehension (i.e., metacomprehension), whether they choose to restudy topics they need to study most, and their actual comprehension of each topic. Student performance on course exams will be used as a more distal measure of impact. Beyond the impact of analogies on each outcome measure, some experiments will test whether the impact of analogies can be moderated by having students draw sketches of the geological phenomena, and by a short online tutorial about how to map between the familiar source and unfamiliar target concepts of an analogy along with warnings to avoid the inflated confidence that might occur due to the analogy source's being familiar. In addition to improving STEM instruction, the findings will have the potential to advance the broader literatures in metacomphrehension, science learning, and use of analogies to convey complex concepts in STEM. This project is supported by the EDU Core Research (ECR) program. ECR emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. Investments are made in critical areas that are essential, broad, and enduring: STEM learning and STEM learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development.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.