1. Cognitive Science Principles
Contrasting Cases
Visualizations
Prior Knowledge & Misconceptions
Spaced Rehearsal & Assessment

2. Contrasting Cases
Learning from two (or several) cases that are simultaneously compared and contrasted
Helps students understand abstract features and structural relations rather than focusing too much on the superficial aspects of individual examples
Comparison can be very informative to learners even when the cases being compared are new and not well-understood
Cases are especially effective when they come at the beginning of instruction

3. Visualizations
Textbooks are full of diagrams, graphs, photographs, etc. which are meant to add crucial information to the written text
Students often ignore them or do not know how to interpret them effectively
Conventions are often implicit or not clearly indicated
Visualization activities help students attend to and interpret different image types, relative scale & magnification, perspective, use of color & other conventions, captions, etc.

4. Prior knowledge is one of the strongest predictors of future learning.
How well does a student’s prior knowledge fit with new learning?
Have a well-developed, accessible framework
Lack a relevant conceptual framework (no foundation)
Have an incomplete or inaccurate conceptual framework (partial or weak fit)
Have a strong misconception (active conflict)

5. Spaced Testing Revisiting material helps students remember it longer
Activating prior knowledge makes it easier to prepare for and connect to new knowledge
Well-designed test items can be more effective for learning than further review or practice
Modifications include daily warm-ups, weekly short assessments, and end of unit tests to put these principles into practice

6. Contrasting Cases
A simple example of the power of having multiple cases
Comparison helps highlight similarities and differences between cases – focus on particular features
Comparison changes what features people attend to in the examples.
Medin, Goldstone, and Gentner, (1993). Respects for similarity. Psychological Review, 100,

7. Contrasting Cases
Comparing cases is more effective than studying them individually
Timing of the contrasting cases. In most textbooks cases are usually placed as homework at the end of a unit of study.
Research has found that case comparison should be done before principles are introduced
Domain: students learning memory concepts
Comparison: analyzing contrasting cases vs. reading a summary of the cases
Hypothesis: students given a chance to compare cases will learn deeply from a lecture than those who read a summary of the case data
Schwartz & Bransford, (1998). Time for telling. Cognition and Instruction, 16,

8. Contrasting Cases Design Treatment A Compare cases Treatment B
Read case summary
Treatment C
Compare cases
Common Learning Experience
Listen to a lecture
Compare cases
again
Target Transfer Task
Predictions about a novel memory experiment
Schwartz & Bransford, (1998). Time for telling. Cognition and Instruction, 16,

9. Compare cases + Lecture
Contrasting Cases
Compare cases + Lecture
Summarize + Lecture
Compare cases
twice
Schwartz & Bransford, (1998). Time for telling. Cognition and Instruction, 16,

10. Visualizations
They are unable to follow the arrows, captions and labels in complex diagrams Hegarty, Kriz, & Cate, 2003

11. Visualizations
Students often fail to make the most of images they come across in curricula (lacking interpretation skills) Berthold & Renkl, 2009
When students do not understand the diagrams they can come away with misconceptions
They might then skip diagrams to avoid further frustration Bartholome & Bromme, 2009

12. Visualizations are common in the classroom…
In American 8th grade classrooms diagrams are used at least once in 52% of lessons and concept maps in 46% of lessons. In 21% of all lessons observed, students made their own diagrams (K. J. Roth et al., 2006).

13. … and Visualizations are common in textbooks
Middle school through undergraduate textbooks have >1 image per page, average1-4 features per image such as captions, labels, arrows, abbreviations, etc. (Cromley, Snyder & Luciw)

14. Visualizations
Middle school science textbooks often have very complex diagrams

15. Visualizations We focus on the following Diagram versus Real Image
Labeling
Captions
Relative scale and magnification
Colors
Cut-away

16. Prior Knowledge & Misconceptions
Research shows one of the strongest predictors of learning is related to what the student already knows (NRC, 1999, 2006)
If the to-be-learned information matches with the organization and framework of the students’ prior knowledge learning is smooth and rapid
Unfortunately, not the case in science learning; students lack the proper conceptual frameworks for learning many new concepts

17. Prior Knowledge & Misconceptions
Much of earth sciences involves learning about entities and processes at a macroscopic level
Challenges of representing dynamic processes over long time scales and large 3-D spaces.
Students have trouble understanding geologic time scales
Geologic processes don’t make sense in short scales
Students have trouble representing 3-D structures
Earth science evidence is frequently 3-D, but pictures are 2-D
Students have trouble reasoning across spatial scales
Rock features are small, formations are large
Students need to add new concepts and explanatory systems to learn new concepts
This should be adjusted to be mostly about earth history concepts…

18. Prior Knowledge & Misconceptions
Many well-documented misconceptions
The geologic world is inert and unchanging.
Geology happened long ago and far away.
Object kind vs. material kind
Etc.
Misconceptions tend to be entrenched in students’ thinking and resistant to change
It’s important to be aware of them and that teaching and learning activities emphasize the correct concepts
Countering misconceptions is generally a long, gradual, process, in which a new causal / explanatory concept is constructed and applied repeatedly

19. Conceptual Challenges in Earth History
Distinctive attributes of Geoscience as an “interpretive and historical science”:
involves large-scale datasets that are often incomplete
involves making “predictions” about the past
involves synthesis of different kinds of systems and data types

20. Distinctive Attributes of Geoscience
Holistic systems thinking: cycles and interactions among major earth systems (e.g., air, water, ice, rock, living things), feedback loops
Phenomena involve very large scales for time and space
High demands on visual representation and three-dimensional spatial thinking
Variety of methodologies and measurements

21. Conceptual Challenges for Students
The Earth is static and unchanging (except for the weather)
Geology happened “long ago and far away” (vs. geologic processes and events are occurring all around us all the time)
Cumulative effects of VERY LONG time scales are underestimated or disregarded, especially for gradual processes (e.g., deposition, erosion)
Rock cycle: rocks, which seem very permanent to kids, change “kinds,” are created and broken down.
Magnitudes of time, pressure, temperature, and systems are far beyond everyday experience

22. Spaced Testing
Why do students forget what they have been taught so quickly?
Research has shown that forgetting can be dramatically reduced by occasionally revisiting old concepts in later tests (Rohrer & Pashler, 2007)
Spaced testing - where the test is spaced out over time instead of being massed
Repeated testing is better than re-study, or a lecturing again, even controlling for the same amount of time (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006)

23. Spaced Testing