Jennifer Cromley

Jennifer Cromley, assistant professor of educational
psychology in the College of Education, is developing and
testing new instructional techniques aimed at teaching
high-school science students how to use the diagrams that
appear in their biology textbooks.

Research from a range of disciplines has shown that people
have difficulty making sense of diagrams. The investigators
had previously found that inference and other high-level
processes that are important for learning from text are even
more important for learning from diagrams. They further showed
that students who use textbook diagrams the least show the
smallest gains in content understanding from the textbook.

The investigators will capitalize on commonalities among
several theories of diagrammatic reasoning to develop four
interventions, following an additive design, aimed at
improving classroom instruction in how to use diagrams. In
each iteration, one additional intervention feature is added
to the initial intervention.

In the first intervention, they will teach the components of
diagrams (i.e., how to read captions, color keys, and other
conventions of diagrams). In the second, they will also teach
the coordinating of text and diagrams. In the third, they will
also have the students engage in self-explanation. In the
fourth, they will also have students construct their own
drawings.

In conjunction with these experimental studies, the
investigators will collect eye tracking data on a subset of
participants pre- and post-intervention in order to look for
possible changes in gaze patterns.