To Compare or Space? The Role of Timing in Children's Science Learning

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

This research will contribute to understanding how science concepts are learned. This project will study how concepts are generalized from individual examples, thus continuing to inform the cognitive science literature on this topic. The experiments will present students with multiple examples of science concepts according to different timing patterns so that students can abstract similarities and differences among them. The studies will directly address a seemingly paradoxical set of findings: presenting examples at the same time and apart in time have both been shown to promote science learning. As such, this work will resolve conflicting findings in cognitive science and science education and, in turn, will generate a body of research that elucidates fruitful methods for designing learning environments. The long-term goal of this work is to provide STEM educators with educative curricular material supplements that outline the timing patterns that promote students' learning outcomes. This project is supported by NSF's EHR Core Research (ECR) program. The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. A series of experiments will test conflicting but possibly mutually informing hypotheses. One line of research in cognitive science has proposed that presenting examples of science concepts simultaneously promotes students' abstraction and immediate generalization of concepts. However, another line of work has argued that spacing presentations across time promotes students' abstraction and long-term generalization of concepts. The current work bridges these two lines of research by examining the conditions under which simultaneous and spaced presentations promote students' generalization. The central hypothesis in this work is that developmental changes in students' cognitive abilities, such as attention, memory, and science knowledge, will create shifts in which presentation schedule promotes their generalization of concepts. The results of this work will generate a cognitive model of how presentation timing impacts students' science learning. This cognitive model will allow researchers and STEM educators to make predictions about the presentation timing that will best promote students' acquisition and generalization of science concepts.