Question-asking is a crucial tool for acquiring information about unseen entities, such as viruses; thus, examining children’s questions within the context of COVID-19 is particularly important for understanding children’s learning about the …
Prior work has shown that many undergraduate students have misconceptions about genetic inheritance, even after they take genetics courses. Visual representations, such as pedigree diagrams, are commonly used in genetics instruction, and they help …
We investigated children’s reasoning about genetic inheritance. We found that 4- to 12-year-old children have a fairly good understanding of how genetic inheritance works, but they reliably have two misunderstandings. The first one is that if the two parents have the same eye color (let's say dark brown) they think that it is more likely for the offspring to have a similar color (dark orange) than a different color (green). The second one is that they think that if the parents have different eye colors, they think that female offspring are more likely to resemble the mother and male offspring are more likely to resemble the father.
We investigated why undergraduate students adopted some strategies and not others. We found that students' rating of the quality of a strategy influenced their adoption, but their ratings of how complex a strategy is did not.
We investigated how exposure to different diagrammatic features influences the features that undergraduate features prefer and include in diagrams that they make. We found that students preferred and drew features that they were exposed to.
We examined whether the perceptual richness of a diagram influences children's learning and transfer of knowledge about metamorphosis. First and second graders who saw the rich diagram during the lesson learned more than those who saw the bland diagram during the lesson. Fourth and fifth graders who saw the bland diagram during the lesson incorrectly transferred more than those who saw the rich diagram during the lesson.
We examined the diagrams found in biology books and online to see if their design alligned with research-based practices. We found that many diagrams had perceptually rich backgrounds, which prior research suggests might hinder learning.
We examined whether the perceptual richness of a diagram influences adults' learning and transfer of knowledge about metamorphosis. Adults who saw the bland diagram during the lesson accurately transferred more than adults who saw the rich diagram during the lesson.
We examined whether strategy adoption depends on the confluence of many factors, including the context in which a target strategy is introduced, characteristics of the learner, and characteristics of the strategy itself.