Representing Variability: The Case of Life Cycle Diagrams

Menéndez, David; Mathiaparanam, Olympia N; Liu, David; Seitz, Vienne; Alibali, Martha W.; Rosengren, Karl S.

doi:10.1187/cbe.19-11-0251

Cited by 9 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 63 publications

(131 reference statements)

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“…The presence of a singular organism in each life stage does not convey diversity of offspring, differential fitness, or the struggle for survival. Menendez et al [31] analyzed life cycle figures in biology textbooks and digital resources and found that 89% of the figures included just one member of each life stage, resulting in a visual lack of within-species variability. Identical members of a species and stable characteristics over time are common misconceptions in evolutionary thinking [32].…”

Section: Focal Concepts Of This Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The pilot survey included 16 multiple-choice and open-ended questions based on our research questions and published records of common ecological and evolutionary misconceptions [31][32][33]. We recruited a convenience sample of 53 students from the university's Student Center.…”

Section: Survey Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The traditional cyclical diagram (CS) only shows one organism per life stage, so withingeneration variation cannot be displayed. This observation was addressed as a concern by Menendez et al [31], who found that "the vast majority of [life cycle] diagrams depicted only one organism per stage (604 of 633 diagrams, 95%)" (p. 10) and that this portrayal "could potentially reinforce the essentialist beliefs that categories are immutable and do not change and that all members of a category look the same" (p. 12). The Cyclical-Multiple (CM) and Linear-Multiple (LM) figures show multiple offspring with very slight variations between them, which may aid the student in applying the idea that offspring vary from each other.…”

Section: Genetic Variationmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Redesign of a Life Cycle Figure Improves Student Conceptions of Ecology and Evolution

Landin,

Cozart

2024

Education Sciences

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Life cycle diagrams communicate the developmental life stages of an organism. Design choices may inadvertently communicate additional information about survivorship rates, genetic variation, and microevolutionary change. In this controlled experiment, we randomly assigned one of three life cycle diagrams to 684 college students. Each figure included identical life stages of a fictitious organism’s development but differed in (1) the number of offspring (single or multiple) and (2) layout (cyclical or linear). Each participant could reference the figure when answering questions about organism survival, variation among offspring, and variation between generations. Students scored 28–30% higher on questions about survivorship when the available diagram included multiple offspring. Students scored 19–30% higher on questions about microevolution when the diagram layout was linear. Overall, students who received the figure with a linear layout and multiple offspring earned the highest average score (54.5%, or 3.3 of six questions) on the assessment, while students with the traditional figure (cyclical layout with single offspring) scored the lowest average (26.1%, or 1.6 of six questions). These results suggest that figure design affects student interpretations and may assist student learning about ecology and evolution concepts and common misconceptions.

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Section: Focal Concepts Of This Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Survey Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Genetic Variationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Redesign of a Life Cycle Figure Improves Student Conceptions of Ecology and Evolution

Landin,

Cozart

2024

Education Sciences

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“…Visual representations are common in educational materials across a range of content domains [23,24]. Visual representations in biology books tend to be perceptually rich, including features such as color, shading, and texture, which make the images appear realistic and similar to their real-world counterparts [25,26]. However, as students progress to higher grade levels, they are exposed to progressively more bland and abstract visual representations [25].…”

Section: Visual Representations In Biology Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Visual Representations in Undergraduate Students’ Learning about Genetic Inheritance

Menendez,

Donovan,

Mathiaparanam

et al. 2024

Education Sciences

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Prior work has shown that many undergraduate students have misconceptions about genetic inheritance, even after they take genetics courses. Visual representations, such as pedigree diagrams, are commonly used in genetics instruction, and they help students quickly visualize the phenotypes of multiple generations. In Study 1, we examined whether presenting a pedigree diagram of a wolf’s eye color in a rich and realistic manner (i.e., with rich perceptual images that resemble real animals) or in an abstract manner (i.e., with circles and squares representing animals) would help undergraduates learn from a brief, online lesson on inheritance of the wolf’s eye color, and whether they would transfer what they learned when reasoning about eye color in other species (near transfer) and other traits in other species (mid- and far transfer). Counter to our hypothesis, students transferred more with the rich diagram. In Study 2, we compared the rich diagram from Study 1 to a perceptually bland diagram (i.e., with color and textural features removed). There were no differences in students’ learning or transfer between the diagrams. These results suggest that realistic elements that are attention grabbing and easily interpretable by students can be beneficial for transfer in online lessons.

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“…This is not a confound in the present experiments as the content was the same across age groups, but could explain why there is a CUES TO GENERALITY difference in the science books. However, even scientific diagrams can be perceptually rich, as has been shown with life cycle diagrams (Menendez, Mathiaparanam, et al, 2020) and pedigree diagrams (Mathiaparanam et al, 2022). Therefore, the effect of perceptual richness might still be relevant at all grade levels.…”

Section: Generalizing From Visualizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cues to generality: Integrating linguistic and visual information when generalizing biological information.

Menendez

2023

Journal of Educational Psychology

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During instruction, students are typically presented with new information through several modalities, such as language and images. Students need to attend to these different modalities and integrate the information in both in order to learn and generalize from instruction. Many studies have shown that the features of each modality, such as the use of generic noun phrases or perceptually bland visualizations, influence how much students generalize. However, few studies have manipulated both the linguistic and visual information to examine how students integrate the two modalities and how they generalize when the modalities cue different levels of generalization. Study 1 examines what combinations of linguistic and visual information are common in elementary school science books. Studies 2–6 show that undergraduate students rely primarily on the linguistic information when generalizing. Study 7 reduced the possible split of visual attention by reading out the text for participants and shows that undergraduate students generalize more broadly when the information in either modality promotes generalization, but their effect does not compound. Study 8 shows that elementary school students generalize more broadly when the linguistic information is broad, but the visual information is rich. These results suggest that students across ages use linguistic features similarly to guide their generalizations, but how they integrate the linguistic and visual information changes with age. Based on these findings, I propose the cues to generality hypothesis, as an account of how students use information in lessons to determine how far to generalize.

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Representing Variability: The Case of Life Cycle Diagrams

Cited by 9 publications

References 63 publications

Redesign of a Life Cycle Figure Improves Student Conceptions of Ecology and Evolution

Redesign of a Life Cycle Figure Improves Student Conceptions of Ecology and Evolution

The Role of Visual Representations in Undergraduate Students’ Learning about Genetic Inheritance

Cues to generality: Integrating linguistic and visual information when generalizing biological information.

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