Outcomes and Mechanisms of Transfer in Invention Activities.
CogSci(2011)
摘要
Outcomes and Mechanisms of Transfer in Invention Activities Ido Roll (ido@phas.ubc.ca) Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative, University of British Columbia 6224 Agricultural Road, Vancouver, BC V6T-1R9, Canada Vincent Aleven (aleven@cs.cmu.edu) Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA Kenneth R. Koedinger (koedinger@cmu.edu) Human Computer Interaction Institute and Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA Abstract Invention activities are structured tasks in which students create mathematical methods that attempt to capture deep properties of data (e.g., variability), prior to receiving instruction on canonical methods (e.g., mean deviation). While experiments have demonstrated the learning benefits of invention activities, the mechanisms of transfer remain unknown. We address this question by evaluating the role of design in invention activities, identifying what knowledge is acquired during invention activities, and how it is applied in transfer tasks. A classroom experiment with 92 students compared the full invention process to one in which students evaluate predesigned methods. Results show that students in the full invention condition acquired more adaptive knowledge, yet not necessarily better procedural knowledge or invention skills. We suggest a mechanism that explains what knowledge invention attempts produce, how that knowledge is productively modified in subsequent instruction, and how it improves performance on some measures of transfer but not others. Keywords: Invention activities, transfer, intelligent tutoring systems, modular knowledge, generation. Introduction Invention activities ask students to design and evaluate mathematical methods that capture deep properties of given examples. For instance, the task in Figure 1 asks students to invent a general method for calculating variability. Invention activities are designed to augment and precede traditional teacher-led instruction (Roll, Aleven, & Koedinger, 2009; Schwartz & Martin, 2004). Following the invention attempt, whether successful or not, students receive instruction on canonical methods for the same problem (“show”), and apply these methods to different problems (“practice”). For example, after inventing measures of variability, students receive show-and-practice instruction on Mean Deviation (MD), that is, the mean absolute difference from the mean. One key aspect of invention activities is the use of contrasting cases (Chase, Shemwell, & Schwartz, 2010). Contrasting cases are carefully designed examples that emphasize target features by changing just those and no other features. For example, the contrasting cases shown in Figure 1 (middle) emphasize distribution while fixing sample size, range, average, etc. The Invention Lab facilitates invention activities in three steps (Roll, Aleven, & Koedinger, 2010). Students are first asked to rank the contrasting cases according to the target property (e.g, the variability of the left graph is lower than that of the right graph, see Figure 1). Students then design a mathematical method and calculate the target property for the given data (e.g., design “range / N” and apply it to both data sets). Last, students evaluate their method by comparing its inferred ranking to the initial qualitative ranking. Once the invented method ranks the contrasting cases successfully, students are given new data to work with. Students often make progress during the invention process, yet they rarely invent a valid general method (Schwartz & Martin, 2004). Classroom evaluations found that the combination of invention activities and show-and- practice instruction improves performance on transfer measures, compared with show-and- practice alone, controlling for overall time on task (Schwartz & Martin 2004; Roll et al., 2009; Kapur, 2008). However, while the positive effect of invention activities is well documented, not enough is known about how this effect is
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关键词
invention activities,transfer,mechanisms
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