Past research has shown that children's mental rotation skills are malleable and can be improved through action experience--physically rotating objects--or gesture experience--showing how objects could rotate (e.g., Frick, Ferrara, & Newcombe, 2013; Goldin-Meadow et al., 2012; Levine, Goldin-Meadow, Carlson, & Hemani-Lopez, 2018). These…

This study explores how feature salience and feature centrality influence inductive generalization in 4- and 5-year-old children and adults. Recent reports indicate that enhancing the salience of a feature--specifically, a creature's head--by making it move shifts children's inductions so that they ignore labels and make inferences that are…

Despite the fundamental importance of plants to our very survival, student interest in plant biology is in decline as technology draws us further away from nature. Here we introduce "Plant Tracer" (http://www.planttracer.com), a Matlab-based program, which can quantify time-lapse videos of plant movement. We demonstrate that Plant Tracer…

Quantifying angularity is critical for the study of K-12 school mathematics and beyond; yet, quantifying angularity is challenging for individuals across these grade levels. Using data from a yearlong teaching experiment with ninth-grade students, I address the role of attentional motion in quantifying angularity and present four such motions…

It has been argued that students' understanding of science ideas and concepts is based on their engagement in science and engineering practices. However, research studying science and engineering practices engaging in the content of school science textbooks is particularly limited. The aim of the present study is to develop a framework and…

This paper draws upon the theory of embodied cognition to provide a robust account of how gestural interactions with and around multi-touch tabletops can play an important role in facilitating collaborative meaning-making, particularly in the context of science data visualizations. Embodied cognition is a theory of learning that implies that…

Video motion analysis allows tracing trajectories of objects in motion and is an established method in physics education. Tablet computers, with their integrated cameras, offer the opportunity to both record and analyze dynamic motions during experiments on a single device. This enables students to work without transitioning the data between…

Much research has focused on the expression of voluntary motion (Slobin, 2004; Talmy, 2000). The present study contributes to this body of research by comparing how children (three to ten years) and adults narrated short, animated cartoons in English and German (SATELLITE-FRAMED languages) vs. French (VERB-FRAMED). The cartoons showed agents…

Cooperative learning, using small groups to complete a common goal, has a positive effect on student achievement and potential in foundational engineering mechanics courses. The purpose of this study was to quantitatively examine the effects of cooperative learning on student performance, if these effects are concept-specific, and perceptions of…

The drag effect on a falling ball caused by air is a conventional subject in the most well-known textbooks of classical mechanics and fluid dynamics. Further, there are some papers that employ video analysis to track objects movements in the air making it possible to obtain position data as a function of time and its graphs. However, none of them…

Nonsigners viewing sign language are sometimes able to guess the meaning of signs by relying on the overt connection between form and meaning, or iconicity (cf. Ortega, Özyürek, & Peeters, 2020; Strickland et al., 2015). One word class in sign languages that appears to be highly iconic is classifiers: verb-like signs that can refer to location…

The law of conservation of momentum can be applied to a wide range of processes whether it is the collision of subatomic particles, rocket propulsion, or the recoil of a cannon. In this experiment two technologies, the Arduino microcontroller and a PASCO smart cart, are used to create a movable rubber band launcher. The Arduino microcontroller is…

In this dissertation I will present my work in both the fields of spintronics and physics education research. In the first section, I present a method to account for spin pumping in spin torque ferromagnetic resonance (ST-FMR) measurements. A spin current can be generated via the spin Hall effect (SHE), which is typically transverse to the charge…

The Embodied Art Therapy Process (TEATP) focuses on the co-creation of embodied artistic expressions to promote self-awareness and autonomy for children. A case study describes how TEATP was implemented to support a child in gaining self-awareness and autonomy. Awareness of her own body, sensations, and feeling allowed her to assert her voice and…

Lecture videos are an integral part of distance education. Much has been done to investigate the effects of lecture video styles, but many of the studies have methodological issues and confounding variables. The current study focused on the amount of motion in two types of lecture videos (hand-drawn and narration-over-PowerPoint) and investigated…