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

Abstract

In this study, we analyzed students’ reasoning and explanations of friction concepts before and after engaging in guided experimentation with visuohaptic (VH) simulations. The VH experimentation included two affordances: visual cues and haptic feedback. Specifically, we analyzed the outcomes of two treatment groups with different sequences of affordance introduction. The first treatment group started with visual cues, with haptic feedback added later, while the second treatment group started with haptic feedback and added the visual cues later. We recruited 48 students who had previously taken at least one physics course. Participants completed a pre‐ and posttest assessment, which included both procedural and conceptual questions about friction before and after the guided experimentation task. The results show that the participants from both treatment groups benefited from using VH simulations. Both treatment groups showed statistically significant pre/post improvements in their understanding of friction. Moreover, both treatment groups showed a statistically significant increase in the conceptual understanding of friction concepts from pretest to posttest with moderate to strong effect sizes. Implications for laboratory instruction are also discussed.

A learner‐centered approach for designing visuohaptic simulations for conceptual understanding of truss structures

“…However, the learning gain difference between the three treatment groups was not significant. These findings are aligned with Yuksel and colleagues' [58] study, which suggested no statistically significant learning differences between sequenced approaches. Furthermore, the present study showed no statistically significant learning differences between students who interacted with the visuohaptic simulation with only enhanced visual cues and the students who interacted with the visuohaptic simulation in a sequenced approach.…”

“…Visuohaptic simulation consists of a simulation engine that provides two-way feedback-it shows visual cues, such as fields or moving objects, and it also provides haptic feedback to the user via a robotic-handle that learners use to explore the environment and control it [13,23,58]. The use of visuohaptic simulations has been adopted as a form of multimodal learning environments characterized by combining and coordinating the input of two or more human modalities (i.e., eye gaze, gestures, and body movement) with the output of interface technologies [34].…”

“…The use of visuohaptic simulations has been adopted as a form of multimodal learning environments characterized by combining and coordinating the input of two or more human modalities (i.e., eye gaze, gestures, and body movement) with the output of interface technologies [34]. The use of haptic devices for learning purposes, including the learning of abstract concepts, has been implemented in physics instruction (e.g., [1,20,21,23,30,58]). The goal of designing multimodal learning environments is to avoid the dissociation between human actions and thoughts and the actions required to interact with the interface [35].…”

“…Researchers have hypothesized that when presenting visualization and haptic feedback together, the visual information could undermine haptic information intake [12,37]. Others have hypothesized that participants may experience cognitive overload [22,58,59]. Magana et al [23] proposed a sequenced approach for learning electricity and magnetism with visuohaptic simulations that were applied to a population of 170 undergraduate students who performed four experiments that provided different combinations of visual and haptic feedback: visual (V) feedback only, haptic (H) feedback only, simultaneous visual and haptic (V + H) feedback, and a sequenced modality of haptic feedback first followed by haptic feedback plus visual feedback (H → V + H).…”

“…Results showed significant learning gains from pretest to posttest for students who received haptic feedback only. For learning about friction, Yuksel and colleagues [58] studied undergraduate students (n = 48), comparing the use of a visuohaptic simulation in two different sequenced approaches (enhanced visual to enhanced visual + haptic [V → V + H] vs. haptic to enhanced visual + haptic [H → V + H]). They found statistically significant differences in the comparison of the pretest and posttest scores for each treatment, but no significant differences between the learning gains of the treatments.…”