PERC 2012 Abstract Detail Page
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| Abstract Title: | Students’ Categories of Mental Representations and Handling of Multiple External Representations |
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| Abstract: | The study explores the relationship between students' mental representations and their handling of sequential multiple representations. A total of 19 engineering students, taking a calculus-based physics course, participated in three individual interview sessions. They completed one directed and five non-directed kinematics tasks. The Johnson-Laird (1983) cognitive framework was used to categorize the types of mental constructs. More than half of the sample (11 in 19, 58%) constructed a propositional mental representation. The remaining 42% (8 in 19) of the cohort generated a mental image. None of the students was classified as constructing a mental model. A trend was observed in how students with these two kinds of cognitive structures handle multiple external representations. Moreover, their actions when dealing with the non-directed tasks posed with different representational formats seem to transfer and hence influence their approach with the directed task containing sequential multiple representations. |
| Footnote: | This work is supported in part by U.S. National Science Foundation Grant # 0816207. |
| Abstract Type: | Contributed Poster Presentation |
Author/Organizer Information | |
| Primary Contact: |
Bashirah Ibrahim Kansas State University, Physics Department 116 Cardwell Hall Manhattan, KS 66506-2601 Phone: 7855321612 |
| Co-Author(s) and Co-Presenter(s) |
N. Sanjay Rebello |
