Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper describes a large scale experiment that evaluates the effectiveness of Law Encoding Diagrams (LEDs) for learning qualitative relations in the domain of elastic collisions in physics. A LED is a representation that captures the laws or important relations of a domain in the internal structure of a diagram by means of diagrammatic constraints. The subjects were 88 undergraduate physics students, divided into three learning trial conditions. One group used computer based LEDs, another used conventional computer based representations (tables and fonnulas), and the third was a nonintervention control group. Only the LED subjects had a significant improvement in their pre-test to post-test qualitative reasoning. The LEDs appear to make it easier for subjects to explore more of the space of different forms of collisions and hence gain a better qualitative understanding of the domain.