Director of Undergraduate Education, School of Education, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697.
Associate Professor of Education, School of Education, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697.
CBE Life Sci Educ. 2020 Dec;19(4):ar61. doi: 10.1187/cbe.19-11-0253.
Reasoning about visual representations in science requires the ability to control one's attention, inhibit attention to irrelevant or incorrect information, and hold information in mind while manipulating it actively-all aspects of the limited-capacity cognitive system described as humans' executive functions. This article describes pedagogical intuitions on best practices for how to sequence visual representations among pre-service teachers, adult undergraduates, and middle school children, with learning also tested in the middle school sample. Interestingly, at all ages, most people reported beliefs about teaching others that were different from beliefs about how they would learn. Teaching beliefs were most often that others would learn better from presenting representations one at a time, serially; while learning beliefs were that they themselves would learn best from simultaneous presentations. Students did learn best from simultaneously presented representations of mitosis and meiosis, but only when paired with self-explanation prompts to discuss the relationships between the graphics. These results provide new recommendations for helping students draw connections across visual representations, particularly mitosis and meiosis, and suggest that science educators would benefit from shifting their teaching beliefs to align with beliefs about their own learning from multiple visual representations.
科学中的视觉表象推理需要能够控制注意力、抑制对不相关或不正确信息的注意力，并在积极操作信息的同时将其牢记在心——所有这些都是有限容量认知系统的方面，被描述为人类的执行功能。本文描述了关于如何在职前教师、成年本科生和中学生中按顺序排列视觉表象的最佳实践的教学直觉，并且在中学生样本中也进行了学习测试。有趣的是，在所有年龄段，大多数人报告的关于教学他人的信念与他们自己学习的信念不同。教学信念通常是，其他人一次呈现一个代表，会学得更好；而学习信念则是他们自己从同时呈现的内容中学得最好。学生确实从有丝分裂和减数分裂的同时呈现的代表中学习得最好，但前提是他们要同时接受自我解释提示，以讨论图形之间的关系。这些结果为帮助学生建立跨视觉表象的联系提供了新的建议，特别是有丝分裂和减数分裂，并表明科学教育者将受益于将他们的教学信念转变为与他们自己从多个视觉表象中学习的信念相一致。
