Coupling Ray Diagrams and Real World Phenomena in Optics

该项目建立在物理教育家和认知科学家之前的研究基础上，解决了科学教学中的一个重要教学问题：如何促进学生学习将现实世界现象与现象的科学表征联系起来的过程。重点领域是几何光学，主要关注人群是职前小学教师。项目活动包括两个主要领域。调查：(1)将开发一个通用模板，用于指定个人关于光学现象的心理模型。该模板将用于描述物理专家和学生的心理模型的不同之处，也用于描述学生在不同教学阶段的心理模型的变化。(2)开发并研究一种基于信息同时编码的心理学原理的教学策略的有效性，以促进学生将射线图和光学现象联系起来的能力。在这个策略中，射线图的表示将与相关光学现象的视觉演示同时呈现。最后，研究人员将开发一个包含无数光学现象示例的视频光盘，并将使用计算机视频光盘系统的文本和图形叠加功能来实施教学策略。

This project builds on previous research by physics educators and cognitive scientists and addresses an important instructional problem in science teaching: how to facilitate the process by which students learn to connect real world phenomena with scientific representations of the phenomena. The domain of focus is geometrical optics and the main population of interest consists of pre-service elementary school teachers. The project activities cover two major areas. The investigations: (1) will develop a general template which will be used for specifying an individuals's mental model about optical phenomena. The template will be used to describe how the physics expert's and students' mental models differ, and also to describe changes in a student's mental model during various phases of instruction. (2) will develop and investigate the effectiveness of an instructional strategy, based upon the psychological principle of simultaneous encoding of information, to facilitate students' ability to connect ray diagrams and optical phenomena. In this strategy ray diagram representations will be simultaneously presented with the visual demonstration of the related optical phenomenon. Finally, the investigators will develop a videodisc with a myriad of examples of optical phenomena, and will use the text and graphics overlay capabilities of a computer videodisc system to implement the instructional strategy.