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How to make a good animation: A grounded cognition model of how visual representation design affects the construction of abstract physics knowledge

Zhongzhou Chen and Gary Gladding
Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 10, 010111 – Published 3 April 2014
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Abstract

Visual representations play a critical role in teaching physics. However, since we do not have a satisfactory understanding of how visual perception impacts the construction of abstract knowledge, most visual representations used in instructions are either created based on existing conventions or designed according to the instructor’s intuition, which leads to a significant variance in their effectiveness. In this paper we propose a cognitive mechanism based on grounded cognition, suggesting that visual perception affects understanding by activating “perceptual symbols”: the basic cognitive unit used by the brain to construct a concept. A good visual representation activates perceptual symbols that are essential for the construction of the represented concept, whereas a bad representation does the opposite. As a proof of concept, we conducted a clinical experiment in which participants received three different versions of a multimedia tutorial teaching the integral expression of electric potential. The three versions were only different by the details of the visual representation design, only one of which contained perceptual features that activate perceptual symbols essential for constructing the idea of “accumulation.” On a following post-test, participants receiving this version of tutorial significantly outperformed those who received the other two versions of tutorials designed to mimic conventional visual representations used in classrooms.

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  • Received 28 May 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.10.010111

This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

Published by the American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Zhongzhou Chen* and Gary Gladding

  • Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA

  • *Corresponding author. zchen22@mit.edu Now at Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

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Vol. 10, Iss. 1 — January - June 2014

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