Conceptual boundaries and distances: Students' and experts' concepts of the scale of scientific phenomena

Abstract

To reduce curricular fragmentation in science education, reform recommendations include using common, unifying themes such as scaling to enhance curricular coherence. This study involved 215 participants from five groups (grades 5, 7, 9, and 12, and doctoral students), who completed written assessments and card sort tasks related to their conceptions of size and scale, and then completed individual interviews. Results triangulated from the data sources revealed the boundaries between and characteristics of scale size ranges that are well distinguished from each other for each group. Results indicate that relative size information was more readily understood than exact size, and significant size landmarks were used to anchor this relational web of scales. The nature of past experiences situated along two dimensions—from visual to kinesthetic in one dimension, and wholistic to sequential in the other—were shown to be key to scale cognition development. Commonalities and differences between the groups are highlighted and discussed. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 43: 282–319, 2006

Haptics and graphic analogies for the understanding of atomic force microscopy

“…In the other domains, research on mental models in learning has provided theories to explain processes and difficulties related to acquiring concepts and building accurate representations of situations depicted in texts and other external representations. This approach has been found as particularly adapted for scientific learning (e.g., Tretter et al, 2006a).…”

“…An interactive vr tool may contribute to promoting awareness and learning of the different aspects of nanoscale phenomena by providing a dynamic and more accurate direct experience of these phenomena (Tretter et al, 2006a;Park et al, 2010) through both visual and haptic feedback. Moreover, as the use of analogies has been shown as helpful for learning in physics (Podolefsky and Finkelstein, 2006), we were interested in evaluating the benefit of using macro-scale notions for the understanding of more exotic nanoscale phenomena.…”

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

“…Students from elementary through PhD, including those with visual impairments, estimate linear spatial magnitude better at human scales and worse at the extremes of scale, nanoscale to astronomical (Tretter et al, 2006a(Tretter et al, , 2006bJones et al, 2008Jones et al, , 2009aJones et al, , 2009b. Typically, the magnitudes of small-scale objects are overestimated, while the sizes of large-scale ones are underestimated; however, one study found that college students both under-and overestimate the sizes of small objects (Gerlach et al, 2014a).…”

“…In contrast, estimation accuracy for objects at the microscopic level or smaller is discontinuous. There is a propensity to judge objects at scalar extremes as more similar in size than they actually are (Tretter et al, 2006a(Tretter et al, , 2006bJones et al, 2009bJones et al, , 2008. Those error patterns persist even when students use a model to support their explanations, specifically a scale model to illustrate astronomical distances.…”

“…Adults continue to use familiar referents as nonstandard measurement units to describe spatial scale, especially when measuring tools are not at hand. Units such as ''room size,'' ''me,'' or ''small'' serve as separate spatial categories along a linear dimension in which objects and distances can be grouped (Tretter et al, 2006a;Jones et al, 2008;Gerlach et al, 2014a). The self or human body remains an important linear spatial metric for all ages, which can be iterated to determine an object's length.…”