Visual Cognition in Undergraduate Biology Labs Can it be Connected to Conceptual Change and Other Le

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Visual Cognition in Undergraduate Biology Labs
Can it be Connected to Conceptual Change and
Other Learning Theories?

• Robert Day
• The Ohio State University
• College of Education
• day.3_at_osu.edu

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"I passed all the other courses that I took at my
university, but I could never pass botany. This
was because all botany students had to spend
several hours a week in a laboratory looking
through a microscope at plant cells, and I could
never see through the microscope. I never once
saw a cell through a microscope. "My Life and
Hard Times" James Thurber, former student of the
OSU Plant Science Department.
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Some visual processing problems

• Visual agnosia (Oliver Sacks)
• Pareidolia
• Perceptual scotoma
• Ambiguous images and perceptual flip

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Pareidolia links

• Definition and earliest citation
• Some examples
• More examples
• Fossil on the moon?

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I love Paris in the the spring time
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I love Paris in the the spring time
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Dissertation Objectives

• Document the visual difficulties that can be a
  barrier to learning in undergraduate biology
  students.
• Find out what students see, what they think they
  see, how they go about making sense of their
  observations and why they sometimes cant see
  anything at all.
• Try to connect the phenomenon to established
  learning theory.
• Suggest teaching and learning strategies that
  will help to efficiently transform novice
  biological observers into experts.

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Possible Influencing Factors

• Eyesight (resolution / acuity)
• Language and semantics
• Direct and indirect content knowledge
• Innate visual cognitive abilities
• Multiple intelligences (Gardener)
• Learning style
• Teaching approach (constructivist, behaviorist
  etc)

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Possible Influencing Factors (2)

• Socio-cultural factors
• Gender, biological / social
• Motivation
• Lifestyle and previous visual environment
• Neurological issues
• Metacognition
• Other factors

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What is conceptual change?For review of
Posners (1982) model go here.
What is a concept?
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For psychologists / philosophers, a concept is
how the human mind constructs a category.
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Yeah but..What is a category?
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• Classical category
• E.g. even numbers divisible by 2
• Defined by rule(s) that are entirely necessary
  and sufficient for membership
• Family resemblance category
• E.g. chair
• Not easily defined by rules

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Problem with F.R category

• No necessary and sufficient conditions
• Infinite way they could be organized
• Especially problematic for biologists because of
  nested, indistinct hierarchy.
• Fallacy of dichotomous keys.

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Do conceptual change educators use the word
concept in the same way as philosophers and
psychologists?

• Probably not.
• Suspect educators are talking about webs of
  concepts connected by relationships and processes
  schemas or conceptual ecology

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According to Posner et. al. conceptual schemas
change by accommodation or assimilation

• Assimilation This occurs when you fit some new
  information into an existing structure or
  conceptual understanding.
• Accommodation This occurs new information cannot
  easily be fit into an existing structure or
  conceptual understanding. Instead, the new
  information requires a transformation and
  reorganization of the conceptual ecology.

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Is perceptual flip the same as Posners
conceptual change?

• Probably not exactlybut
• Perceptual change is similar and it often leads
  to conceptual change.

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Example 1 seal donkey

• in ocean
• moving, swimming?
• splashing
• making a noise (bark?)
• therefore alive?
• seals bark swim
• seals live in ocean

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Seal donkey anomalies

• Not swimming gracefully
• Appears to rising out of water illogical
• Noise not like a seal
• Rear fins out of water illogical
• Eyes seem to be releasing steam
• Fins dont look right

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Post perceptual flip seal donkey

• fins ears must be concave not flat
• swimming drowning
• barking braying
• natural event unusual
• happy animal animal in distress
• no further action necessary action may be
  required to save drowning donkey

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Example 2 sponge squirt
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Interesting things to note.

• Many optical illusions involve images of living
  things.
• Cognitive scientists often describe perceptual
  categorization problems involving living things.
• A special part of the brain is implicated in the
  process of recognizing living things.

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And yet..

• Biological science educators appear not to have
  studied the pedagogic implications of the unique
  cognitive challenges found only in their
  discipline?

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Rationale for this Research

• Alert biology instructors to the problem
• Increase student performance and practical skills
• Alert biological researchers and medical imagers
  to issues related to reliability of graphical
  data
• Expedite postgraduate novice-expert
  transformation
• Integration of neurology and psychology with
  educational science
• Expand conceptual change theory
• Implications for societal scientific literacy and
  environmental awareness