Search results for "Students understanding"

Visual cues improve students’ understanding of divergence and curl: Evidence from eye movements during reading and problem solving

2019

The coordination of multiple external representations is important for learning, but yet a difficult task for students, requiring instructional support. The subject in this study covers a typical relation in physics between abstract mathematical equations (definitions of divergence and curl) and a visual representation (vector field plot). To support the connection across both representations, two instructions with written explanations, equations, and visual representations (differing only in the presence of visual cues) were designed and their impact on students’ performance was tested. We captured students’ eye movements while they processed the written instruction and solved subsequent c…

Students' Understanding of the Special Theory of Relativity and Design for a Guided Visit to a Science Museum

2009

International audience; This paper describes the design of teaching materials that are used as learning tools in school visits to a science museum. An exhibition on the A century of the Special Theory of Relativity, in the Kutxaespacio Science Museum, in San Sebastian (Spain), was used to design a visit for first year engineering students at the university and assess the learning which was achieved. The first part of the paper presents the teaching sequence which was designed to build a bridge between formal teaching and the exhibition visit. The second part analyses the potential of the exhibition and the aforementioned teaching sequence to influence the students' knowledge of three aspect…

2020

Domain-specific understanding of digitally represented graphs is necessary for successful learning within and across domains in higher education. Two recent studies conducted a cross-sectional analysis of graph understanding in different contexts (physics and finance), task concepts, and question types among students of physics, psychology, and economics. However, neither changes in graph processing nor changes in test scores over the course of one semester have been sufficiently researched so far. This eye-tracking replication study with a pretest-posttest design examines and contrasts changes in physics and economics students' understanding of linear physics and finance graphs. It analyze…

Threshold Concepts for Modeling and Assessing Higher Education Students’ Understanding and Learning in Economics

2018

In the last decade, the research carried out on threshold concepts as a content-based way to model students’ understanding and learning in several domains has increased. However, empirical evidence on this approach is still scarce. In this chapter, the authors investigate the adequacy of the threshold concepts approach in the domain of business and economics in higher education following an established differentiation between basic, discipline, and modeling thresholds. After conducting a cognitive interview study using verbal reports, a self-assessment questionnaire was used to assess the respondents’ familiarity with the content and their security to solve the tasks. Results indicate that …