College students' temporal‐magnitude recognition ability associated with durations of scientific changes

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore college students' recognition of temporal magnitudes associated with durations of scientific changes through construct validation of a 30‐item instrument. We administered the instrument to 514 students from 10 higher education institutions in the United States. Among them, 419 students took the instrument at the end of science courses. The remaining 95 students took the instrument before and after a course on cosmic evolution, and additionally answered whether they knew, estimated, or randomly guessed at the temporal magnitude of each item in the instrument. We also collected exam scores for the cosmic evolution course students. Using descriptive statistics and a Rasch analysis, we investigated construct validity of the instrument in terms of psychological relevance, psychometric conformity, and instructional sensitivity. Results of this study indicate that (1) the temporal‐magnitude recognition ability is a measurable construct, (2) extremely small duration items are significantly more difficult for students to recognize accurate temporal magnitudes than other duration range items, (3) direct knowledge of the magnitude contributes to the measurement of the construct, (4) the instrument is sensitive to instruction designed to improve the construct, and (5) the temporal‐magnitude recognition ability is not significantly correlated with knowledge about the related scientific changes. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 317–335, 2011

Learning About Spatial and Temporal Scale: Current Research, Psychological Processes, and Classroom Implications

“…Conversely, Lee et al (2011) found that the ability to estimate an event's temporal duration (magnitude) is weakly correlated with whether students said they knew the event's duration or guessed. Upper division undergraduate majors in biology or geology are only marginally better than lower division undergraduates (Catley and Novick, 2009) at estimating the absolute placement of biological and geological events in Earth's history, even though the nature of their estimation errors differs.…”

“…Unlike the spatial magnitude studies, there is no good empirical evidence of the existence of a common temporal metric akin to the human body (Delgado, 2013b). Only a few temporal scale magnitude studies include events that occur on human timescales (Lee et al, 2011;Delgado, 2013b;Jolley et al, 2013;Cheek, 2012Cheek, , 2013aCheek, , 2013bCheek, , 2016, so the potential value of any familiar, embodied event, such as day, year, or generations, is unclear.…”

“…As is true for spatial size estimation or placing events on the geological timescale, university undergraduates overestimate the durations of events that occur on timescales too short to be perceived by humans (e.g., typical neuron response to stimulus) and underestimate the durations of events with long time spans (e.g., mountain formation) (Lee et al, 2011). While they generally do best at estimating temporal durations of events at human timescales, they are not universally good at those scales.…”

Finding the time: Exploring a new perspective on students’ perceptions of cosmological time and efforts to improve temporal frameworks in astronomy

“…The outcome is that any associated scientific events that occur on timescales using such numbers become misrepresented. Lee et al [21] also found that students tended to overestimate durations of time for large temporalmagnitude categories; however, students also tended to overestimate durations of time smaller than one millisecond. In related work, Tretter et al [76] explored students' conceptions of spatial scales and noticed students had difficulty providing accurate sizes of objects at the microscopic scale.…”

“…All physical science disciplines require their learners to possess some grasp of time-be it the time required for an event to happen, or for change to occur [21]. Time is inherent in order to grasp Darwin's theory of evolution, piece together Earth's geological history, approach the concept of climate change, or predict the eventual death of our Sun.…”