Spatial thinking in astronomy education research

Cole, Merryn; Cohen, Cheryl A.; Wilhelm, Jennifer; Lindell, Rebecca

doi:10.1103/physrevphyseducres.14.010139

Cited by 45 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 96 publications

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“…Previous work has found that students' spatial reasoning correlates with their understanding of lunar concepts [53,54]. Understanding of Moon phases also requires understanding the dynamic evolution of the phases over time and space [54], likely facilitated through interacting with and moving around a simulation. Furthermore, the traditional hands-on activity for teaching Moon phases (described below) is susceptible to various real-world inaccuracies, such as creating eclipses every month or rotating or orbiting the wrong way.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ready student one: Exploring the predictors of student learning in virtual reality

et al. 2020

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Immersive virtual reality (VR) has enormous potential for education, but classroom resources are limited. Thus, it is important to identify whether and when VR provides sufficient advantages over other modes of learning to justify its deployment. In a between-subjects experiment, we compared three methods of teaching Moon phases (a hands-on activity, VR, and a desktop simulation) and measured student improvement on existing learning and attitudinal measures. While a substantial majority of students preferred the VR experience, we found no significant differences in learning between conditions. However, we found differences between conditions based on gender, which was highly correlated with experience with video games. These differences may indicate certain groups have an advantage in the VR setting. are many potential explanations for these differences [14], two relate to how learners and technology interact through issues of embodiment and real-world complexities. This study aimed to test the impact of these variables by directly comparing student learning and attitudes from three different instructional technologies (a hands-on activity, desktop simulation, and virtual reality simulation), while taking advantage of their respective affordances along the dimensions of embodiment and real-world complexity. EmbodimentTheories of learning argue that cognition is inherently embodied: "the mind must be understood in the context of its relationship to a physical body that interacts with the world." [15, p.625]. Research has found that learning benefits from activities that explicitly attend to embodied cognition [16][17][18]. There are several ways in which embodiment is argued to support learning, generally tied to a hypothesis whereby activities help move cognition from abstract to concrete representations of a phenomenon [16].Two such notions of embodied cognition focus on how learners off-load cognitive work on to the environment and how off-line cognition is body-based [15,19]. These notions suggest physical aspects of cognition, whereby learning is supported through engaging perceptuo-motor systems [20]. Indeed, nearly all science education advocates for the use of interactive hands-on activities [21]. Through hands-on activities and demonstrations, learners connect abstract concepts to their physical environment. For example, researchers in physics education have developed embodied activities for teaching concepts of energy conservation [22]. In these activities, learners assign units of energy to physical objects (either cubes or people) [23], and then manipulate those objects to represent processes of energy transfer and dynamics. Through these concrete representations of an otherwise abstract phenomenon, learners develop their conceptual and mechanistic understandings of the phenomenon [22]. By manipulating physical objects, students can see deep features of the phenomena, allowing them to effectively integrate the features into their mental models of the phenomena [20,24].Two other notions of embodied cogn...

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ready student one: Exploring the predictors of student learning in virtual reality

et al. 2020

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“…Spatial thinking has increasingly been identified as an important competency in different science disciplines [11,75] and astronomy is no different in this respect [1,10,[76][77][78]. Indeed, astronomy as a discipline seems to demand excellence in the ability to extrapolate three dimensionality in one's mind from one-or two-dimensional semiotic resources.…”

Section: The Multidimensionality Hierarchy and Extrapolating Threementioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is often taken for granted in astronomy education that students will be able to, in their minds, extrapolate a 3D experience from 1D and 2D representations. This is despite the growing body of research indicating that this is often not the case [1,11,78,[80][81][82][83]. For example, Parker and Heywood [82] found that students had great difficulty in moving from 2D representations of the solar system to 3D representations.…”

Section: The Multidimensionality Hierarchy and Extrapolating Threementioning

confidence: 99%

“…A graphical representation of how reading the sky is related to disciplinary discernment and extrapolating three dimensionality, by linking observations and experiences to disciplinary knowledge. research (AER) community to further investigate the connection between success in learning astronomy and extrapolating three dimensionality [76,78,90,[93][94][95]. Here, virtual and augmented reality, and planetaria, are found to offer new possibilities for approaching this [96][97][98][99][100][101][102][103].…”

Section: The Multidimensionality Hierarchy and Extrapolating Threementioning

confidence: 99%

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Disciplinary discernment: Reading the sky in astronomy education

Eriksson

2019

Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res.

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This theoretical paper introduces a new way to view and characterize learning astronomy. It describes a framework, based on results from empirical data, analyzed through standard qualitative research methodology, in which a theoretical model for a vital competency of learning astronomy is proposed: reading the sky, a broad description under with various skills and competencies are included. This model takes into account not only disciplinary knowledge but also disciplinary discernment and extrapolating three dimensionality. Together, these constitute the foundation for the competency referred to as reading the sky. In this paper, these competencies are described and discussed and merged to form a new framework vital for learning astronomy to better match the challenges students face when entering the discipline of astronomy.

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“…AER should also expand to new research topics. Spatial thinking in astronomy is an important area that would benefit from rigorous experimental research [5]. Student motivation and related constructs are also currently underdeveloped in the context of AER [14,16,17].…”

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confidence: 99%