Undergraduate students’ conceptual interpretation and perceptions of haptic-enabled learning experiences

Abstract

Although visualization remains a primary mode of interaction in simulations, touch is the most common way people use to interact with the physical objects. A greater sense of immersion in a learning environment can be reached when the user is able to feel and manipulate objects as compared to only seeing or listening. Despite the affordances of haptic technologies, which could serve as scaffolds for deep conceptual learning, their true potential in education has not been fully harnessed and little research has been done to investigate its effectiveness for learning difficult concepts. This study explores the potential of haptic technologies in supporting conceptual understanding of difficult concepts in science, specifically concepts related to electricity and magnetism. A pretest-posttest study identified if students improved their conceptual understanding of electricity and magnetism concepts. Specifically, this study identified (a) how students, with different physics background, conceptually interpreted the tactile learning experience in the context of the visualization, and (b) students' perceptions on the use of haptic technologies for their learning, as well as their perceived usefulness and ease of use. Our results suggest that overall students significantly improved their conceptual understanding about electric fields for distributed charges after being exposed to a visuohaptic simulation guided activity. Regarding students' prior coursework, students with high school-only physics background outperformed students who have been previously exposed to college-level physics courses 8% higher in the posttest average score. Similarly, students overall agreed that they enjoyed using the haptic device for learning and found the technology as easy to interact with. Implications for teaching and learning are provided as well as venues for future work.

Visuohaptic experiments: Exploring the effects of visual and haptic feedback on students’ learning of friction concepts

“…Moreover, there is a leap in the number of CC between the pre‐ and posttests for scenarios 3 and 4 while the number of CN remained the same. These results show similarity with Han and Black , Shaikh et al , and Magana et al, studies reported that embodied haptic experiences may facilitate learning physics concepts via building a solid cognitive foundation.…”

Unpacking students' conceptualizations through haptic feedback

“…Science education is not the exception. Researchers who have investigated the educational potential of haptic technologies argued that the sense of touch can enhance conceptual understanding by making more accessible difficult concepts in science and engineering by visualizing them and enhancing their exploration (Jones & Magana, ; Shaikh, Magana, Neri, Escobar‐Castillejos, Noguez & Benes, ). Embodied Cognition is the underlying theory that supports this notion.…”

Information Technology Transforming Higher Education: A Meta-Analytic Review

“…IT-aided learning tools have been found very effective in improving the learning outcomes of students for various subjects such as statistics (Peterson, 2016), mathematics (Spradlin & Ackerman, 2010), science (Shaikh et al, 2017;Zhu, Valcke, & Schellens, 2009), technology (Lee, Barker, & Kumar, 2016), education (Choi & Yang, 2011), medicine (Patterson, Kilpatrick, & Woebkenberg, 2010), nursing (Öztürk & Dinç, 2014), and language (Rahimi & Miri, 2014). Several studies have demonstrated that ITmediated teaching options like flipped classrooms help students outperform their traditional counterparts in biology (Marcey & Brint, 2013), physiology (Tune et al, 2013), and human-computer interaction courses (Day & Foley, 2006).…”