T259 Geoscience Education Research: Implications for Undergraduate Geoscience Teaching and Learning (Posters)

Tuesday, 24 October 2017
9:00 AM - 6:30 PM
Halls 4EF

TESTS OF AN EXEMPLAR-MEMORY MODEL OF HUMAN CLASSIFICATION LEARNING IN THE DOMAIN OF ROCK CATEGORIZATION

Paper number: T259-8
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 9:00 AM – 6:30 PM

Authors

Abstract

Experiments were conducted in which novice participants learned to classify pictures of rocks into their scientifically-defined categories. The experiments manipulated the distribution of training instances during an initial study phase, and then tested for correct classification and generalization performance during a transfer phase. The similarity structure of the to-be-learned categories was also manipulated across the experiments. A low-parameter version of an exemplar-memory model, used in combination with a high-dimensional feature-space representation for the rock stimuli, provided good overall accounts of the categorization data. The successful accounts included: 1) predicting how performance on individual item types within the categories varied with the distributions of training examples; 2) predicting the overall levels of classification accuracy across the different rock categories; and 3) predicting the patterns of between-category confusions that arose when classification errors were made. The work represents a promising initial step in scaling up the application of formal models of human perceptual classification learning to complex natural-category domains. We also provide evidence that training with images of the rocks can provide a significant head-start on learners’ ability to generalize to novel physical rock samples from the trained categories. Finally, we discuss further steps for making use of the model and its associated feature-space representation to search for effective techniques of teaching rock categories in the geology classroom.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 49, No. 6

doi: 10.1130/abs/2017AM-300574

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