Learning Temporally Structured Concepts

About This Grant

The goal of the proposed research is to advance knowledge of how to apply cognitive principles about the understanding of temporally structured concepts to the design of animated STEM instructional materials. The focus of this research will be on STEM concepts that involve processes and transformations that unfold over time, such as photosynthesis and earthquakes. Relatively little is known about how students learn STEM concepts that involve a sequence of steps or phases compared to how they learn more static concepts, such as kinds of rocks. Analyses show that the current use of animations in practice to teach such concepts does not consistently improve learning. In this project, the research team will build on recent substantial advances in cognitive science about how people understand and remember everyday events and attempt to apply these cutting-edge findings to further the understanding of how people learn about processes and transformations in complex STEM concepts. They will test a theory-driven intervention using real-world STEM instructional material. Should this work be successful, it will help to explain why some STEM instructional animations aid student learning, and why the majority of such animations currently used in educational practice do not. Moreover, the output of this project will provide principles that will eventually guide how such animations should be designed in the future to facilitate STEM learning. In this project, a transdisciplinary team with expertise in psychology, neuroscience, the science of learning, and science education will test a new hypothesis about how students learn temporally structured concepts. Theories and empirical data from studies of everyday event comprehension and memory suggest that segmenting ongoing information into appropriate temporal parts enables people to better learn and remember those parts. In turn, this can protect that information from confusion with other similar information, keeping important concepts distinct. This research will test the possibility that the same comprehension and encoding mechanisms are brought to bear on concept learning when learners interact with instructional materials teaching concepts for processes and transformations. The research team will test this hypothesis by combining experimental manipulations with analyses of individual differences. At the center of their approach will be the deployment of theoretically grounded learning interventions, using authentic STEM education materials. The outcomes of the research will not only advance understanding of basic cognition, but will also form a basis for probing new teaching methods that could be effective in practice. This project is jointly supported by the EDU Core Research (ECR) program and the the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program. ECR supports fundamental research that generates foundational knowledge to advance the research literatures in STEM learning and learning environments. ITEST supports projects that build understandings of practices, program elements, contexts and processes contributing to increasing students' knowledge and interest in STEM and information and communication technology careers. 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.