About
Research in cognitive psychology over the past decades has established that domain experts (no matter whether physics, mathematics, or plant taxonomy) recognize features and patterns not observed by novices. This understanding has important ramifications for teaching. Studies have shown the importance of developing experiences designed to enhance student recognition of meaningful patterns of information.
For example, in botany, field trips can be effective learning tools to teach plant identification because they help expose students to the variation in character states requisite for training their minds to recognize features and patterns like domain experts. After all, observational repetition in the field played a key role in field botany experts becoming experts in the first place. However, classroom or homework activities that mimic exposure to variation in the wild can also play an important role in developing expertise. These can even be necessary in cases where field labs are not possible, or where natural variation is not easily demonstrable given time constraints.
To facilitate the development of such activities, we here present a freely available, open-access, html/javascript-based visual learning tool that facilitates recognition through active image sorting exercises. Although our exercises are drawn from our own domain expertise (botany), the tool is customizable to meet the needs of any activity for which sorting can enhance learning.
Project team
The web site, the tutorial, and sample templates for the various categories of sorts were developed by Dr. A. Krings (North Carolina State University). Javascript and xml code was written by P. Agarwal (University of North Carolina, Greensboro) in collaboration with Dr. B.K. Kirchoff (University of North Carolina, Greensboro; Metis Learning).
Please cite this web resource as: Krings, A., P. Agarwal, and B.K. Kirchoff. 2014. Image Sort Visual Learning. North Carolina State University and Metis Learning. [http://herbarium.ncsu.edu/ImageSort/; date accessed]
You are free to use as-is, modify, or build upon the images and image sorts herein to suit your needs, provided the end-use is non-commercial and proper attribution is made. All images in the downloads were taken by A. Krings and are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.
