Learning Nanoscience Concepts Through a Nanoscale Experience

Abstract

Invisible nanoscale phenomena are difficult to learn, as people have no experience of observing nanoparticles and their behaviors in everyday life. To help address this issue, two different treatment conditions were developed: (a) working with two different Agent-Based Models (ABMs) and (b) watching two dynamic visualizations. An empirical study was conducted to compare students in these two groups in terms of reasoning strategies on assessments of declarative and explanatory knowledge as well as solving transfer problems. The findings suggest that the ABM students' reasoning strategies on the explanatory knowledge tasks and problem-solving activities seemed to have been influenced by the previous computationally embodied learning experience. Nevertheless, the dynamic visualization students seemed to rely on memory retrieval of information from the videos.