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

合作研究：教学类比对地球科学导论中理解错觉的影响

• 批准号: 2300992
• 负责人: Nicole LaDue
• 金额: $ 22.98万
• 依托单位: Northern Illinois University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-08-01 至 2027-07-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2300992&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Effects; instructional; analogies

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.

类比在地质学和其他STEM领域的教科书和其他教学材料中随处可见。“地壳就像一个多层蛋糕，上面有许多不同颜色的糖霜。“这是一个用于教授地质学的类比的例子。类比学被广泛认为是有效的教学工具，因为它们把学生已经熟悉的东西与一个新的不熟悉的概念联系起来。但同样的特征也可能导致理解的错觉。学生可能会认为，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了解的不熟悉的东西（地壳中的地层）。相比之下，科学概念可能要复杂得多，并且具有简单、熟悉的对象所不具有的特征。如果类比的局限性没有为学生详细说明，他们可能会对自己的知识过于自信，而无法做出充分理解所需的额外努力。这将是一个错误的元压缩，破坏了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导论中使用类比，以探讨其对学生对自己知识的判断准确性的潜在负面影响，并制定旨在消除或减少这种负面影响的课程。研究结果的意义将超越地质学领域，因为类比是STEM领域学习环境的一个普遍方面。目前的项目将涉及对类比如何在地质学广泛采用的教学资源中使用的系统分析，还将包括在本科生介绍地球科学教室中进行的一系列实验，这些学生主要是大学新生和大学生。所有用于实验的材料将是真实的课堂材料，完全融入课程的在线作业活动。这些实验的基本程序是，学生将阅读地球科学中各种主题的教科书摘录，这些摘录在是否包括类比方面系统地变化。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水平（“你认为在5个项目的测试中你会正确多少个项目？），并要求他们确定哪些主题将选择重新学习。然后，学生将参加每个主题的理解测试，这些测试需要推理，而不仅仅是单词的记忆。该过程允许计算学生在他们对自己的理解的判断中有多准确（即，元理解），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。学生在课程考试中的表现将被用作更远的影响衡量标准。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调节，以及通过一个简短的在线教程，关于如何在熟悉的类比源和不熟悉的类比目标概念之间进行映射，沿着警告，以避免由于类比源的熟悉而可能出现的自信膨胀。除了改进STEM教学外，这些发现还将有可能推动元认知、科学学习和使用类比来传达STEM中复杂概念的更广泛文献的发展。该项目由EDU核心研究（ECR）计划支持。ECR强调基础STEM教育研究，产生该领域的基础知识。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响力审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。