FIRE: Making Meaning from Geoscience Data

This laboratory research project seeks to understand more about how students form inferences and interpretations as they view geoscience data visualizations. Individual participants view data visualizations of topography/bathymetry or ocean salinity while answering an experimenter’s spoken questions about what they are seeing and what they think it means. Their responses and gestures are videotaped, and their gaze position is recorded using a Tobii eye-tracking system. This is a collaborative project with the Spatial Intelligence & Learning Center, funded under a special NSF program to foster interdisciplinary research in education.

  • What do experts and novices look at and see while viewing geoscience data? Learn more
  • Does providing a hypothesis array help students make meaning from an unfamiliar dataset? Learn more [pdf]
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