Effect of Visualizations and Active Learning on Students Understanding of Electromagnetism Concepts.pdfVIP

Effect of Visualizations and Active Learning on Students’ Understanding of Electromagnetism Concepts♦ Yehudit Judy Dori Department of Education in Technology and Science Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel and Center for Educational Computing Initiatives, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA 02139, USA and John Belcher Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA Models are playing an increasing role in science curriculum (Gilbert Boulter, 2000) and science educators as well as instructors agree that students need to understand the importance of the models that they are taught (Treagust, Harrison, Venville, Dagher, 1996) and to construct their own models (Justi Gilbert, 2002). If students are to fully understand the nature and implications of a model, they must be taught it in an appropriate range of modes of representation (Boulter Gilbert, 2000; Treagust et al., 1996). In order to construct a model of a phenomenon several modes of representation can be used: concrete, verbal, symbolic, mathematical and visual modes. In this study we use concrete and visual modes of representations: desktop experiments, graphs, diagrams, virtual models, and animations (Dori Barak, 2000; Dori Belcher, 2001) as well as the mathematical mode, while solving analytical problems of electromagnetism. Introduction The Technology-Enabled Active Learning (TEAL) Project at MIT (Belcher, 2001) involves the use of media-rich software for simulation and visualization in a freshman electromagnetism course. Visualization technology can support meaningful learning by enabling the presentation of