written by Elise Agra, Drew Johnson, John Hutson, Lester C. Loschky, and N. Sanjay Rebello

Research has shown that visual cues can facilitate problem solving by helping direct students' attention to relevant areas of a diagram. We investigate the effect of visual cues and outcome feedback on students' visual attention while solving conceptual physics problems containing a diagram. Students (N=89) enrolled in introductory mechanics courses were individually interviewed using a think-aloud protocol. Students solved four sets of problems, each set containing an initial problem, four training problems, a near transfer problem, and a far transfer problem. Students in the cued conditions saw visual cues on the training problems, and students in the feedback conditions were told whether their responses were correct or incorrect. Two weeks later, the same students solved near and far transfer problems from the main study. We found that a combination of visual cues and outcome feedback significantly improves performance on transfer and delayed transfer problems. Cueing and feedback influence shifts in visual attention to the relevant areas of the diagram on the transfer and delayed transfer problems differently.

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Last Modified December 16, 2015

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