Effect of representation format on conceptual question performance and eye-tracking measures

Previous studies have shown the important role of different representations in the teaching and learning of physics. In this study, we used eye tracking to investigate the effect of different representations on the process of answering conceptual questions. We compared students’ scores and eye-tracking measures on isomorphic questions which contained graphical, pictorial, and verbal representations. On average, in two-thirds of cases, students were consistent in their answers (correct or incorrect) across all three representations. There was no statistically significant difference in students’ scores for different representations. However, eye-tracking measures suggest that it was easiest for students to extract information from verbal representations and most difficult from pictorial representations for the conceptual questions used in this study. These results could be useful to teachers and researchers when creating conceptual questions and, more generally, when teaching with multiple representations

Effect of students’ investigative experiments on students’ recognition of interference and diffraction patterns: An eye-tracking study

Recognition of interference and diffraction patterns is a difficult task for both high-school and university students. Many students fail to observe important features of particular patterns and identify the differences among similar patterns. In this study, we investigated if performing students’ investigative experiments can help high-school students in recognition of typical interference and diffraction patterns. Students in the experimental group were exposed to a teaching intervention that included five students’ investigative hands-on experiments on wave optics whereas the control group had the standard lecture-based physics teaching. We measured eye movements of students from both the experimental and control groups while they were identifying patterns produced by monochromatic light on a double slit, single slit, and diffraction grating, and by white light on a diffraction grating. Students from the experimental group had a higher percentage of correct answers than students in the control group that indicated that students’ investigative experiments had a positive effect on their recognition of interference and diffraction patterns. However, the low percentage of correct answers, even in the experimental group, confirms that distinguishing of the typical interference and diffraction patterns remains a difficult task for high-school students even if they had performed investigative hands-on experiments. Eye-tracking data showed that students from the experimental group had a shorter dwell on multiple-choice patterns, possibly because they were more familiar with interference and diffraction patterns and felt more confident in choosing the correct pattern. All students attended more to those patterns which they chose as the correct answer and that corroborates the previous findings. Overall, the results indicate that students’ recognition of interference and diffraction patterns can be improved by introducing hands-on investigative experiments in the classroom

Diminutives as pioneers of derivational and inflectional development – a cross-linguistic perspective

Although diminutives are commonly viewed as being typical of child speech and childdirected speech, their acquisition has so far neither been studied in a cross-linguistic perspective nor been related to recent theoretical developments in the study of diminutives and of the associated evaluative classes of augmentatives and pejoratives (Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi, 1994, 2001; Jurafsky, 1996). However, the cross-linguistic study of the development of diminutives is apt to shed light on much debated theoretical issues in the acquisition of morphology and on the impact of language typology on acquisition. We expect productivity, morphological transparency and salience in the input language to favour diminutive acquisition, which, in turn, may even facilitate the development of inflectional morphology. Our paper is meant to address these issues based on extensive longitudinal child data from typologically different languages. The data are transcribed and morphologically coded according to CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000) within the “Cross-linguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition”. The main languages to be considered in this paper are the Indo-European inflecting-fusional languages Lithuanian, Croatian, Greek and German, as well as the agglutinating languages Turkish and HungarianVytauto Didžiojo universiteta