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Enhancing Science Education with Novel Approaches to the Design of Visualization Tools

Mike Stieff, University of California - Davis (Click name for speaker's biography)
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
BSB 2019

Recent advancements in educational technologies have led to an explosion of visualization software for teaching and learning science, particularly chemistry. To varying degrees, visualization tools help teachers and students perceive the imperceptible objects and phenomena of the chemical world. Although some visualization tools have seen great success in the classroom, others have had little impact on student learning and understanding. The present talk explores a novel cognitive model that both motivates the use of computer-based visualization tools for teaching chemistry and explains the variability in learning outcomes that result from their use. First, I argue for a more complete model of teaching and learning in chemistry that empirically defines the role of visualization tools in the classroom. Using data from tandem psychometric and protocol studies, I identify some unique difficulties with learning chemistry that constrain the possible affordances of visualization tools. Next, I apply this cognitive model to the design of a unique visualization tool, Connected Chemistry, that employs interactive computer simulations. Created under the direction of a teacher-researcher work circle, Connected Chemistry encourages students to reason about chemistry concepts from a molecular perspective. I conclude with a discussion of the learning outcomes seen from one recent classroom implementation of Connected Chemistry. Results from the implementation indicate that Connected Chemistry can selectively improve students’ representational fluency. That is, students using Connected Chemistry learned to employ accepted representations of the molecular world more adeptly than students learning without visualization tools; however, improvements in representation fluency did not guarantee a comparable gain in declarative knowledge. Findings from the Connected Chemistry implementation empirically support the novel cognitive model and offer several implications for future teacher-researcher collaborative design efforts.

Audio File:
m_stieff_060228.mp3 30 MB

Quicktime Movie
(Right Click/Control Click & Save to download):
85 Minutes (164 MB)