Gadgil, Soniya
(2009)
EFFECTIVENESS OF HOLISTIC MENTAL MODEL CONFRONTATION IN DRIVING CONCEPTUAL CHANGE.
Master's Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
Students' flawed conceptions can often be corrected during learning by successive contradictions from text sentences, allowing them to revise or replace their individual false beliefs as they read a text. Although this process supports learning new knowledge at a local level (i.e., individual propositions) it is less effective in facilitating systemic conceptual change. In contrast, constructive processes such as self-explaining can facilitate conceptual change through building a mental model from cumulative revisions of individual false beliefs. In the current experiment, I investigated whether comparing and contrasting examples can achieve the same outcome. Students (n=22) in the compare group were first shown a diagram of with their own flawed mental model, and then asked to compare it with a diagram of the correct model. This condition was compared with self-explaining the correct diagram (n=22), and a control condition in which students simply read the text twice (n=20). Results showed that the compare group performed better than the other two groups on questions requiring deep inference making.
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Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
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| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
|
| ETD Committee: |
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| Date: |
29 September 2009 |
| Date Type: |
Completion |
| Defense Date: |
22 December 2008 |
| Approval Date: |
29 September 2009 |
| Submission Date: |
24 April 2009 |
| Access Restriction: |
No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately. |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > Psychology |
| Degree: |
MS - Master of Science |
| Thesis Type: |
Master's Thesis |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
holistic confrontation; conceptual change; mental models |
| Other ID: |
http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-04242009-111036/, etd-04242009-111036 |
| Date Deposited: |
10 Nov 2011 19:42 |
| Last Modified: |
15 Nov 2016 13:42 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/7611 |
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