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.
I investigated how children and adults use visual and linguistic cues to determine how broadly to generalize facts.
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 investigated how parents make decisions about the healthiness of foods when presented with different representations of the same nutritional information. Providing parents with nutritional information did not influence their ratings of how healthy food items are. Parents reported talking with their children about nutrition, believed they are the best source of information for children about nutrition, and believed their nutrition beliefs influence their children's beliefs.
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 manipulated perceptions of variability by priming students before a lesson and by highlighting variability in the diagrams used during the lesson. Priming led to more endorsement of metamorphosis, but only among those with high prior knowledge.