written by Amy Rouinfar, Elise Agra, Jeffrey Murray, Adam M. Larson, Lester C. Loschky, and N. Sanjay Rebello

Research has demonstrated that attentional cues overlaid on diagrams and animations can help students attend to the relevant areas and facilitate problem solving. In this study we investigate the influence of visual cues and correctness feedback on students' reasoning as they solve conceptual physics problems containing a diagram. The participants (N=90) were enrolled in an algebra-based physics course and were individually interviewed. During each interview students solved four problem sets each containing an initial problem, six isomorphic training problems, and a transfer problem. The cued conditions saw visual cues on the training problems, and the feedback conditions were told if their responses (answer and explanation) were correct or incorrect. We found that visual cues and correctness feedback significantly improves students' abilities to solve the training and transfer problems.

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Published February 1, 2014
Last Modified February 1, 2014

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