Vanessa Svihla

A Design-based Approach to Fostering Understanding of Global Climate Change

To prepare students to make informed decisions and gain coherent understanding about global climate change, we tested and refined a middle school inquiry unit that featured interactive visualizations. Based on evidence from student pre-test responses, we increased emphasis on energy transfer and transformation. The first iteration improved comprehension of the visualizations resulting in better understanding of energy transfer (n = 67). The second iteration improved understanding of energy transformation (n = 109) by adding pivotal cases, reducing deceptive clarity, and emphasizing distinguishing of ideas. Focusing student investigations in the second version allowed students to make more normative, personally relevant decisions related to their energy use. These iterative refinements reflected knowledge integration principles and offer guidance for designers of inquiry units.

Measuring Knowledge Integration Learning of Energy Topics: A two-year longitudinal study

Although researchers call for inquiry learning in science, science assessments rarely capture the impact of inquiry instruction. This paper reports on the development and validation of assessments designed to measure middle-school students’ progress in gaining integrated understanding of energy while studying an inquiry-oriented curriculum. The assessment development was guided by the knowledge integration framework. Over 2 years of implementation, more than 4,000 students from 4 schools participated in the study, including a cross-sectional and a longitudinal cohort. Results from item response modeling analyses revealed that: (a) the assessments demonstrated satisfactory psychometric properties in terms of reliability and validity; (b) both the cross-sectional and longitudinal cohorts made progress on integrating their understanding energy concepts; and (c) among many factors (e.g. gender, grade, school, and home language) associated with students’ science performance, unit implementation was the strongest predictor.

Facilitating Problem Framing in Project-Based Learning.

While problem solving is a relatively well understood process, problem framing is less well understood, particularly with regard to supporting students to learn as they frame problems. Project-based learning classrooms are an ideal setting to investigate how teachers facilitate this process. Using participant observation, this study investigated how teachers supported students in taking ownership over the framing of problems in a charter school that serves students who have been underserved by traditional schooling. Data include audio/video records, field notes, interviews, and student work from a nineweek project. Interaction analysis was used to examine ownership and learning over time. Analysis suggests that providing a relevant yet revisable design problem, giving instruction about design process as iterative, and problematizing a model of design process supported students in taking ownership over the framing of the problem; students were motivated to pose questions and gathered information purposefully, thereby learning in the process.

Collaboration and framing as dimensions of design innovation

This study of student teams learning to design in an engineering course reveals that interaction and framing are important dimensions for understanding innovative design. By employing social network analysis to incorporate interaction within statistical models, it is apparent that teams viewed early as having innovative ideas, who score higher on perspective-taking and who have higher team cohesion, tend to produce more innovative final designs. Case studies suggest that for iteration to lead to productive design innovation it should be framed as practical, design activity rather than as scientific or theoretical activity.

Distributed practice in classroom inquiry science learning

ABSTRACT This study is inspired by laboratory studies demonstrating that distributing study sessions over time better supports learning and retention than clustering sessions. We compare two implementations of a multi-day inquiry science unit: in the clustered instruction condition, students completed an inquiry unit in five consecutive class periods. In the distributed instruction condition, students completed one activity per week for five weeks. Both conditions resulted in significant and similar gains in understanding and retention overall. Students’ self-directed revisits to previously studied materials differed by condition, with students in the clustered condition tending to visit materials studied on previous days. These distal revisits explained variance in delayed post-test scores as an interaction effect with condition. Students in the clustered condition who revisited distal materials tended to score higher on the delayed post-test, whereas those in the distributed condition who did so tended to score lower. Our findings illustrate the complexity of realising laboratory findings in classrooms under real-world conditions.

Teaching Professional Practice: Using Interactive Learning Assessments to Simulate the Nutrition Care Process

Teaching professional practices, such as the Nutrition Care Process (NCP), in lecture-based undergraduate nutrition courses can be difficult. Online Interactive Learning Assessments (ILAs) were pilot tested as a way to teach the NCP in an undergraduate nutrition course at a state university. Participating students were satisfied with the ILAs and reported that they provided the feel of authentic practical experience with the NCP. As measured by examination performance, students had similar mastery of content knowledge introduced via ILAs versus lecture. ILAs may allow students to gain content knowledge and effective professional practice skills.

Interactive design and simulation of tubular supporting structure

Abstract This paper presents a system for design and simulation of supporting tube structure. We model each freeform tube component as a swept surface, and employ boundary control and skeletal control to manipulate its cross-sections and its embedding respectively. With the parametrization of the swept surface, a quadrilateral mesh consisting of nine-node general shell elements is automatically generated and the stress distribution of the structure is simulated using the finite element method. In order to accelerate the complex finite element simulation, we adopt a two-level subspace simulation strategy, which constructs a secondary complementary subspace to improve the subspace simulation accuracy. Together with the domain decomposition method, our system is able to provide interactive feedback for parametric freeform tube editing. Experiments show that our system is able to predict the structural character of the tube structure efficiently and accurately.