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

了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，每个学科都得出了非常不同的结论。一项研究表明，人们在受教育前对机械物理的直觉基本上是正确的，另一项研究表明，这些直觉在很大程度上是错误的，还有一项研究表明，这些直觉在婴儿时期是不正确的，但在接受重要的物理教育之前就已经变得正确了。这些看似矛盾的发现使教育干预措施的发展复杂化，因为一项研究建议的干预措施被其他研究所禁止。这个项目的首要目标是开始综合和协调这些不同的工作线。该项目本质上是跨学科的，将依赖于新的和新兴的方法来进行稳健和可重复的研究，如自动在线测试、公民科学和高级分析。这些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，这一职业发展项目的教育部分将集中于加强这种培训，包括增订关于计算建模和分析的创新的互动式教科书，拟订和执行公民科学的密集夏季培训方案；并为本科生提供直接的实践教育。该项目由EDU核心研究（ECR）项目作为CAREER奖资助，该项目支持推进STEM学习、扩大参与和劳动力发展的基础研究文献的工作。许多研究文献都提出了关于机械物理直觉理解本质的问题，但它们往往支持不同的结论，从而使它们对基本认知架构的表征以及教育干预设计的含义变得模糊。此外，由于这些结论来自不同的学科团体，他们使用不同的方法研究不同的人群，因此尚不清楚这些差异是否反映了人们在不同情况下如何看待不同的物理过程的真正差异，还是仅仅是人为的。该项目的目标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，以试图确定差异表现（如果有的话）是否表明存在多个潜在的认知系统。目的2将使用发展心理学的工具来研究儿童在任务上的年龄相关差异，从文献的范围来看，发展科学家观察到的发展模式是否特定于他们的方法。目标3将调查在这些学科中开发的测量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刺激、任务和研究方法，这些都是目前脱节的文献中常见的，允许直接比较和综合，受试者的年龄范围从6个月到成年人。所有这三个目标都将涉及异常庞大和多样化的样本——通常是通过利用自动化在线测试和公民科学——以及高级分析。通过尝试调和这些相对不一致的文献，该项目将有可能为不同年龄的物理教育干预的发展做出贡献。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。

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.