The goal of this EHR Core Research project, focused on the area of STEM learning, is to use cognitive science theories of embodied cognition to enhance student learning in physics. A central hypothesis being investigated is that providing students with direct experience with physics quantities (e.g., feeling the mass distribution in an extended object through balancing techniques designed to locate an object's center of gravity (COG)), as opposed to reading about the concepts in a textbook or using more traditional hands-on activities (e.g., hanging weights from an extended object to visually determine an object's COG), enhances learning. Laboratory experiences where students feel physics quantities may lead to the recruitment of brain areas devoted to sensorimotor processing when students later think and reason about the physics concepts they experienced. When these sensorimotor areas are involved in thinking and reasoning, people's understanding of the concepts in question may improve. In the cognitive science laboratory, experiments 1-4 investigate whether and how direct engagement with physical objects through balancing activities can promote the conceptualization of extended objects as discrete components, thus enhancing students' ability to locate a system's COG. Experiments 5, 6, 8, & 9 move to the physics classroom to explore how sensorimotor experience may relate to understanding the COG topic and ameliorate common misconceptions, and to determine the optimal time (relative to lecture) for sensorimotor experience. Experiment 7 explores the cognitive and neural substrates driving the link between experience and understanding using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm. Overall, this work seeks to uncover how and why certain laboratory experiences are effective, facilitating the design of easy-to-implement guidelines that educators can use in their own courses to enhance student learning.
