Mixed media modelling of technological concepts in electricity, methods for supporting learning styles

The overarching objective of this research is to recognize the learning styles of engineering and technology students and to propose pedagogical methods for the comprehension of technological concepts in electricity. The topic of electrical resistor-capacitor (RC) circuits has been chosen because it is fundamental to engineering and technology courses. There is substantial evidence to suggest that students find such a concept difficult to grasp. The focus of the research lies in explicating undergraduate students cognitive structures about RC circuits, and proposing a method related to students learning styles of how these cognitive structures may be enhanced. The main thesis argument claims that the transfer of knowledge from familiar RC circuit configurations to unfamiliar RC circuit configurations does not occur easily even if the problem-space is kept identical. The methodology used in this research is a mixed-method approach employing qualitative and quantitative data-gathering and analysis processes. This research concludes that the reasons for lack of transfer of knowledge stem from conceptual and perceptual constraints. Constraints involve: (a) which analogical models are employed in relation to the RC circuit, (b) how the circuit schematic diagram is drawn, and (c) relations between analogy, circuit schematic diagram, voltage-time graphs and verbal jargon used to describe circuit behaviour. The research presents a variety of novel, custom-designed learning aids which are employed within the research methodology to rectify the lack of transfer of knowledge for the RC circuits considered in the study. The design of these learning aids is based on the concept of embodied cognition and mainly makes use of visual and kinaesthetic means to appeal to students who may have different learning styles. The use of such learning aids is proposed as a complementary teaching strategy. The approach taken in this research and its outcomes are significant because they continue to inform the research and educational communities about how human development may be fostered through engineering and technology education (Barak and Hacker, 2011)

How Culture comes to Mind: From Social affordances to Cultural analogies

Until now, the naturalist attempts to account for cultural phenomena have tended to see them as representations that spread within the population thanks to the counterintuitive properties making them salient and easy to remember. As a supplement to this view, which postulates a kind of cognitive distance between individuals and culture, this paper proposes a naturalist model that takes into consideration the strong cognitive involvement and the participative rather than contemplative stance triggered by a good many cultural phenomena. Such a model tries to defend a «continuist view » of the link between nature and culture by calling partially into question the traditional emphasis of social sciences on the artificial, arbitrary dimension of social facts. For the authors, indeed, this emphasis does not account for the naturality and universality of a certain number of elementary social forms. Once the partial naturality of the social is asserted, the purpose is to describe the emergence of cultural phenomena. The hypothesis put forward here is that analogical capacities, also natural, which allow human minds to «draw » cultural forms from the world of nature, either physical or social, play a central role in the elaboration of a sphere of collective experience that is both cultural and intuitive.Comment la culture vient à l'esprit. Des affordances sociales aux analogies culturelles. Jusqu’à présent, les tentatives naturalistes visant à rendre compte des phénomènes culturels ont eu tendance à les appréhender comme des représentations qui se diffusent dans la population grâce à leurs propriétés contreintuitives, qui retiennent l’attention et facilitent la mémorisation individuelle. En complément à cette perspective, qui présuppose une forme de distanciation cognitive entre les individus et leur culture, cet article propose un modèle naturaliste qui prend acte de la forte implication cognitive et de la posture, non pas contemplative mais participative, que provoquent bon nombre de phénomènes culturels. Un tel modèle tente de défendre une «vision continuiste » du lien entre nature et culture en remettant partiellement en question la focalisation traditionnelle des sciences sociales sur la dimension artificielle et arbitraire des faits sociaux. Pour les auteurs, en effet, cette focalisation ne rend pas compte de la naturalité et de l’universalité d’un certain nombre de formes sociales élémentaires. Une fois posée la naturalité partielle du social, l’objectif est alors de rendre compte de l’émergence des phénomènes culturels. L’hypothèse défendue ici est que les capacités analogiques, elles aussi naturelles, qui permettent aux esprits humains de «dériver » les formes culturelles du monde de la nature, qu’il soit physique ou social, jouent un rôle central dans l’élaboration d’une sphère de l’expérience collective qui est tout à la fois culturelle et intuitive.Clément Fabrice, Kaufmann Laurence. How Culture Comes to Mind: From Social Affordances to Cultural Analogies. In: Intellectica. Revue de l'Association pour la Recherche Cognitive, n°46-47, 2007/2-3. Culture and Society: Some Viewpoints of Cognitive Scientists. pp. 221-250

Characterizing High School Students\u27 Systems Thinking in Engineering Design Through the Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) Framework

The aim of this research study was to examine high school students\u27 systems thinking when engaged in an engineering design challenge. This study included 12 high school students that were paired into teams of two to work through an engineering design challenge. These dyads were given one hour in their classrooms with access to a computer and engineering sketching paper to complete the design. Immediately following the design challenge, the students participated in a post hoc reflective group interview. The methodology of this study was informed by and derived from cognitive science\u27s verbal protocol analysis. Multiple forms of data were gathered and triangulated for analysis. These forms included audio and video recordings of the design challenge and the interview, computer tracking, and student-generated sketches. The data were coded using Gero\u27s FBS framework. These coded data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The transitions were further analyzed using measures of centrality. Additionally, qualitative analysis techniques were used to understand and interpret systems and engineering design themes and findings. Through the qualitative and quantitative analyses, it was shown that the students demonstrated thinking in terms of systems. The results imply that systems thinking can be part of a high school engineering curriculum. The students considered and explored multiple interconnected variables, both technical as well as nontechnical in nature. The students showed further systems thinking by optimizing their design through balancing trade-offs of nonlinear interconnected variables. Sketching played an integral part in the students\u27 design process, as it was used to generate, develop, and communicate their designs. Although many of the students recognized their own lack of drawing abilities, they understood the role sketching played in engineering design. Therefore, graphical visualization through sketching is a skill that educators may want to include in their curricula. The qualitative analysis also shed light on analogical reasoning. The students drew from their personal experience in lieu of professional expertise to better understand and expand their designs. Hence, the implication for educators is to aid the students in using their knowledge, experience, and preexisting schemata to work through an engineering design

Advancing Computational Models of Narrative

Report of a Workshop held at the Wylie Center, Beverly, MA, Oct 8-10 2009Sponsored by the AFOSR under MIT-MURI contract #FA9550-05-1-032

Developing and Evaluating Visual Analogies to Support Insight and Creative Problem Solving

The primary aim of this thesis is to gain a richer understanding of visual analogies for insight problem solving, and, in particular, how they can be better developed to ensure their effectiveness as hints. While much work has explored the role of visual analogies in problem solving and their facilitative role, only a few studies have analysed how they could be designed. This thesis employs a mixed method consisting of a practice-led approach for studying how visual analogies can be designed and developed and an experimental research approach for testing their effectiveness as hints for solving visual insight problems

How Can Robots Adapt To A Social Human World? A Study Into The Role Gestures Can Play In Human-Robot Relations

There is no doubt that robots are now starting to increasingly be integrated into mainstream society, and as they do the amount of contact and the number of interactions they have with humans will increase at a similar rate. These interactions open a new set of issues for robot designers and programmers. What is the best way for robots to interact with humans? This study tested the importance of gestures in creating effective human-robot interactions. Conducted using the PR2, this study explored the role of gestures in two basic kinds of communications: the robot communicating a need: low power) to an unsuspecting human, and a robot building trust with a human participant on an instruction reading task. We predicted that gestures would lead to more effective interactions than the non-gesture controls. We also used the opportunity to explore a largely unresearched area in proxemics: the idea that loose, “bouncing†arms led to lower attributions of dominance than stiff, fixed arms. Our research highlighted the importance of gestures in communication, particularly among people who tended to look at robots as more than machines

The You-Turn in Philosophy of Mind: On the Significance of Experiences that Aren’t Mine.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2018

What Geoscience Experts And Novices Look At, And What They See, When Viewing Data Visualizations

This study examines how geoscience experts and novices make meaning from an iconic type of data visualization: shaded relief images of bathymetry and topography.  Participants examined, described, and interpreted a global image, two high-resolution seafloor images, and 2 high-resolution continental images, while having their gaze direction eye-tracked and their utterances and gestures videoed. In addition, experts were asked about how they would coach an undergraduate intern on how to interpret this data.  Not unexpectedly, all experts were more skillful than any of the novices at describing and explaining what they were seeing.  However, the novices showed a wide range of performance.  Along the continuum from weakest novice to strongest expert, proficiency developed in the following order: making qualitative observations of salient features, making simple interpretations, making quantitative observations.  The eye-tracking analysis examined how the experts and novices invested 20 seconds of unguided exploration, after the image came into view but before the researcher began to ask questions.  On the cartographic elements of the images, experts and novices allocated their exploration time differently:  experts invested proportionately more fixations on the latitude and longitude axes, while students paid more attention to the color bar.  In contrast, within the parts of the image showing the actual geomorphological data, experts and novices on average allocated their attention similarly, attending preferentially to the geologically significant landforms.   Combining their spoken responses with their eye-tracking behavior, we conclude that the experts and novices are looking in the same places but “seeing” different things

Understanding transfer from a dynamic system approach:Two studies of children using problem-solving tasks

Transfer is not static but a dynamic process of learning. In this article, the concept of transfer and the implications of its study are reconsidered from the theoretical basis of the complex dynamic system approach. We describe “transfer” as an emergent process that implies not a copy of knowledge applied to a new situation, but a new configuration of knowledge to solve new situations. Therefore, we discussed the concept of transfer based on the following dynamic principles: soft-assembly, multi causality, variability, self-organization, and iteration. To reconsider the concept of transfer, we provide empirical evidence, illustrating these principles by discussing two studies of transfer carried out with preschoolers. The participants were 34 children of 4 years old (M = 4,6), and 8 children of 4 to 6 years old (M = 5,2). Using repeated measure designs (3 weeks and 6 months, respectively), participants worked on sets of problem-solving situations in the domain of physics (i.e. Archimedes’ principle and Air pressure). By using time-series graphs we identified the relevant elements of the tasks used by the children during the problem-solving process to analyze how this process changes over time. Results show transfer as a self-organized and context-related process in which the information is not static but in constant transformation