CAREER: How Many Intuitive Physics Systems are There, and What Do They Mean for Physics Education

职业：有多少直观的物理系统，它们对物理教育意味着什么

基本信息

批准号：
2238912
负责人：
Joshua Hartshorne
金额：
$ 156.27万
依托单位：
Boston College
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Continuing Grant
财政年份：
2023
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2023-03-01 至 2028-02-29
项目状态：
未结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2238912&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
CAREER How Many Intuitive Physics

项目摘要

Basic research into understanding how children learn physics concepts has been pursued relatively independently in several different disciplines (cognitive psychology, developmental science, and physics education research), each of which has come to very different conclusions. One research literature suggests that people's pre-educational intuitions about mechanical physics are largely veridical, another literature suggests that these intuitions are largely incorrect, and yet another suggests that they are incorrect in infancy but become veridical even before significant physics education. These seemingly contradictory findings complicate the development of educational interventions, since interventions suggested by one line of research are contraindicated by others. The overarching goal of this project is to start synthesizing and reconciling these different lines of work. The project is inherently interdisciplinary and will depend on new and emerging methods for robust and reproducible research such as automated online testing, citizen science, and advanced analytics. Such tools are increasingly important in human research but relatively little training in them for students is available. Thus, the educational component of this CAREER project will focus on enhancing such training and includes updating an innovative, interactive textbook on computational modeling and analysis, developing and running an intensive summer training program for citizen science; and providing undergraduates with direct, hands-on education. The project is funded as a CAREER award by the EDU Core Research (ECR) program, which supports work that advances the fundamental research literatures on STEM learning, broadening participation, and workforce development. Multiple research literatures have engaged questions about the nature of intuitive understandings of mechanical physics, but they have often supported discrepant conclusions, thereby making ambiguous what their implications are for the characterization of fundamental cognitive architecture as well as for the design of educational interventions. Moreover, because these conclusions arise from different disciplinary communities studying different populations using different methods, it is not clear whether these discrepancies reflect real differences in how people think about different physical processes in different situations or whether they are simply artifactual. Objective 1 of this project will apply the tools of psychophysics in order to test the reliability of a range of tasks developed in these literatures in an attempt to determine whether differential performance (if any) suggests multiple underlying cognitive systems. Objective 2 will use the tools of developmental psychology to study age-related differences in children on tasks adapted from the range of literatures to see whether the developmental patterns observed by developmental scientists are specific to their methods. Objective 3 will investigate whether the measures developed in these disciplines differentially predict student success in introductory university physics. Thus, the three objectives will systematically assess and compare the stimuli, tasks, and research methods common to the currently-disjoint literatures, allowing for direct comparison and synthesis, with subjects ranging in age from 6 months to adults. All three objectives will involve unusually large and diverse samples --- often by utilizing automated online testing and citizen science -- and advanced analytics. By attempting to reconcile these relatively disjoint literatures, the project will have the potential to contribute to the development of educational interventions in physics at a variety of ages.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

在几个不同的学科（认知心理学，发展科学和物理教育研究）中，对了解儿童学习物理概念的理解方式的基础研究相对独立，每个学科都得出了截然不同的结论。一项研究文献表明，人们对机械物理学的教育前直觉在很大程度上是垂直的，另一篇文献表明，这些直觉在很大程度上是不正确的，而另一种直觉则表明，它们在婴儿期是不正确的，但甚至在重大物理教育之前就变得垂直。这些看似矛盾的发现使教育干预措施的发展变得复杂，因为另一项研究提出的干预措施被其他人禁忌。该项目的总体目标是开始综合和核对这些不同的工作。该项目本质上是跨学科的，将取决于用于鲁棒和可再现研究的新的和新兴的方法，例如自动化在线测试，公民科学和高级分析。这样的工具在人类研究中越来越重要，但是为学生提供了相对较少的培训。因此，该职业项目的教育组成部分将着重于增强这种培训，并包括更新有关计算建模和分析的创新，互动教科书，开发和运行针对公民科学的强化夏季培训计划；并为大学生提供直接的，动手的教育。该项目由EDU Core Research（ECR）计划作为职业奖资助，该计划支持促进有关STEM学习，扩大参与和劳动力发展的基本研究文献的工作。多项研究文献引起了有关机械物理学直觉理解的性质的问题，但是它们经常支持差异结论，从而模棱两可，使他们对基本认知建筑的表征以及教育干预设计的含义。此外，由于这些结论是由使用不同方法研究不同人群研究不同人群的不同学科社区产生的，因此尚不清楚这些差异是否反映了人们在不同情况下对不同身体过程的思考方式的真正差异，或者它们是否只是人为。该项目的目标1将应用心理物理学工具，以测试这些文献中开发的一系列任务的可靠性，以确定差异性能（如果有的话）是否建议多个基本的认知系统。目标2将使用发育心理学的工具来研究儿童在适应文献范围的任务上与年龄相关的差异，以查看发展科学家观察到的发展模式是否特定于他们的方法。目标3将调查这些学科中制定的措施是否会差异地预测学生在入门物理学中的成功。因此，这三个目标将系统地评估和比较当前偶口文献所共有的刺激，任务和研究方法，从而可以直接比较和合成，而受试者的年龄从6个月到成人。这三个目标通常都将涉及异常大而多样化的样本 - 通常是通过使用自动化的在线测试和公民科学以及高级分析。通过试图调和这些相对矛盾的文献，该项目将有可能为各个时代的物理学教育干预做出贡献。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是值得通过基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛影响的审查标准来通过评估来支持的。