TY - GEN
T1 - Epistemic actions in science education
AU - Kastens, Kim A.
AU - Liben, Lynn S.
AU - Agrawal, Shruti
PY - 2008
Y1 - 2008
N2 - Epistemic actions are actions in the physical environment taken with the intent of gathering information or facilitating cognition. As students and geologists explain how they integrated observations from artificial rock outcrops to select the best model of a three-dimensional geological structure, they occasionally take the following actions, which we interpret as epistemic: remove rejected models from the field of view, juxtapose two candidate models, juxtapose and align a candidate model with their sketch map, rotate a candidate model into alignment with the full scale geological structure, and reorder their field notes from a sentential order into a spatial configuration. Our study differs from prior work on epistemic actions in that our participants manipulate spatial representations (models, sketches, maps), rather than non-representational objects. When epistemic actions are applied to representations, the actions can exploit the dual nature of representations by manipulating the physical aspect to enhance the representational aspect.
AB - Epistemic actions are actions in the physical environment taken with the intent of gathering information or facilitating cognition. As students and geologists explain how they integrated observations from artificial rock outcrops to select the best model of a three-dimensional geological structure, they occasionally take the following actions, which we interpret as epistemic: remove rejected models from the field of view, juxtapose two candidate models, juxtapose and align a candidate model with their sketch map, rotate a candidate model into alignment with the full scale geological structure, and reorder their field notes from a sentential order into a spatial configuration. Our study differs from prior work on epistemic actions in that our participants manipulate spatial representations (models, sketches, maps), rather than non-representational objects. When epistemic actions are applied to representations, the actions can exploit the dual nature of representations by manipulating the physical aspect to enhance the representational aspect.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=56549098456&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-540-87601-4_16
DO - 10.1007/978-3-540-87601-4_16
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:56549098456
SN - 3540876006
SN - 9783540876007
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 202
EP - 215
BT - Spatial Cognition VI
T2 - International Conference Spatial Cognition 2008
Y2 - 15 September 2008 through 19 September 2008
ER -