T205 Making Thinking Visible: Actions and Expressions of Problem Solving and Decision Making in the Geosciences

Tuesday, 24 October 2017
8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Room 2B

WHAT KINDS OF QUESTIONS DO UNDERGRADUATES GENERATE WHILE EXPLORING DATA VISUALIZATIONS PERTAINING TO SEA LEVEL RISE AND CLIMATE CHANGE?

Paper number: T205-12
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 10:45 AM – 11:00 AM

Authors

Abstract

Question-asking in science is a necessary step towards generating hypotheses, making decisions, and solving problems. However, research on student question-asking behaviors has been sparse. In this study, undergraduates engaged with geoscience data visualizations and generated questions about what they were seeing. Visualizations came from the Polar Explorer app (https://thepolarhub.org/project/polar-explorer), which offers numerous data maps pertaining to changing sea level and global climate. Experimental conditions allowed comparison between: (a) question-generating vs. non-question generating; (b) use of the app vs. use of a paper atlas with the same visualizations; (c) exposure to a map set about causes of sealevel change vs. a map set about who is vulnerable to sealevel change; and (d) a prompt to generate as many questions as possible vs. to write down questions you would like to ask the scientist who collected the data. Pre- and post-activity questions probed knowledge and belief about climate change and scientific data.

From the questions that students generated, we developed a taxonomy of question types, with the following major categories: Non-question; Questions about the app; Questions about data or data representation; Questions about the Earth. Students asked more and deeper questions about the Earth, a moderate number of questions about the data and its representations, and few questions about the app. The "generate many questions" prompt elicited more questions than the "Ask a scientist" prompt. Within "Questions about the Earth," major subcategories are Causality, Consequences, Other Data, and Mitigation/Adaptation/Intervention. Causality is by far the most abundant. Within “Causality,” the most sophisticated questions queried an apparent discrepancy between an aspect of the mapped data and the students’ mental model, suggested a process or mechanism that may have influenced the mapped phenomenon, or asked about the cause of a temporal or spatial trend or pattern that the student had noticed. When asked, post-activity, how likely they would be to engage in future climate-related activities, student in the question-generating condition were more likely to "seek out data maps when I have questions about the Earth’s climate" than were non-question-generating participants.

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

doi: 10.1130/abs/2017AM-306131

© Copyright 2017 The Geological Society of America (GSA), all rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to the author(s) of this abstract to reproduce and distribute it freely, for noncommercial purposes. Permission is hereby granted to any individual scientist to download a single copy of this electronic file and reproduce up to 20 paper copies for noncommercial purposes advancing science and education, including classroom use, providing all reproductions include the complete content shown here, including the author information. All other forms of reproduction and/or transmittal are prohibited without written permission from GSA Copyright Permissions.