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。“地壳就像一个多层的蛋糕，上面有许多不同颜色的糖霜。”这是一个用来教授地质学的类比的例子。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陌生概念联系起来。但这个相同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)，他们就知道了他们需要学习什么关于陌生的东西(地壳中的地层)。相比之下，科学概念可能要复杂得多，并具有简单、熟悉的对象所不具备的特征。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，无法提出充分理解所需的额外努力。这将是元理解的一个错误，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生地质学入门课中使用类比，以探索类比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学领域，因为类比是STEM领域学习环境中普遍存在的一个方面。目前的项目将涉及如何在广泛采用的地质学教学资源中使用类比的系统分析，还将包括一系列实验，将在本科生地球科学入门课堂上进行，学生主要是大学一年级和二年级学生。实验使用的所有材料都将是真实的课堂材料，完全融入课程的在线作业活动。这些实验共同的基本程序是，学生将阅读教科书中关于地球科学各种主题的摘录，这些摘录在是否包括类比方面存在系统性差异。在学习完所有主题后，学生们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答对多少个项目？)并被要求确定他们将选择哪些主题进行重新研究。然后，学生们将参加每个主题的理解测试，这些主题需要推理推理，而不仅仅是记忆单词。这一过程允许计算学生对他们自己的理解(即元理解)的判断的准确性，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影响的更远距离的衡量标准。除了类比对每个结果衡量标准的影响外，一些实验还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解，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映射类比的概念以及警告，以避免由于熟悉类比来源而可能出现的过度自信。除了改进STEM教学外，这些发现还有可能推动更广泛的文献，包括元认知、科学学习和使用类比来传达STEM中的复杂概念。该项目得到了EDU核心研究(ECR)计划的支持。ECR强调能够产生该领域基础知识的STEM基础教育研究。这一奖项反映了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，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.