Supporting Mental Model Building

A mental model refers to a learner's cognitive representation of their learning. 

For well-understood topics, learners' mental models will be more in-depth, sophisticated, and strongly connected to similar topics. For less familiar topics, learners may hold naïve beliefs. Through my projects, I began to recognize ways to support mental model building in my designs. 

Different representations of the same concept have different affordances for learning.

Providing a variety of representations increases the opportunities learners have to add details to their mental models and form connections across mental models. 

As I developed the Pollinator Protectors kit, I noticed that learners showed more evidence for learning when the content was represented in multiple forms (i.e., images, descriptions, labels). By providing learners with more details over time and in different formats, learners could deepen their understanding across the activities and connect new details with previously explored concepts, strengthening their mental models. See the images below for examples of how native plant-pollinator pairs were represented across the various materials in the kit.

Activating prior knowledge can give learners a foundation upon which they can build new knowledge.

When the content is totally new, grounding it in something learners are familiar with will support learners' mental model building because it will activate something they already know and help them develop their understanding from there.

Because of this, in Artful Analytics, I chose to focus on real-world examples that learners were likely to already be familiar with to personalize the learning experience. The examples provided in the sessions activated learner's prior experiences with a given topic. For instance, when looking at a data-art representation of an data communicator's book collection (see images below), one learner noticed that this person had no comic or horror books -- his favorite genres. He naturally started to imagine how his book shelf representation would look and articulated how the "variables" would change. When encountering something new, examples helped learners bring their existing knowledge and experiences to the fore, incorporating new information that was just outside the bounds of what was known and familiar. 

Read more of my insights!