Brain activity can be used to measure how well concepts are understood

“Learning about STEM topics is exciting but it can also be quite challenging. Yet, through the course of learning, students develop a rich understanding of many complex concepts. Presumably, this acquired knowledge must be reflected in new patterns of brain activity. However, we currently don’t have a detailed understanding of how the brain supports this kind of complex and abstract knowledge, so that’s what we set out to study,” said senior author David Kraemer, an assistant professor of education at Dartmouth College.

Twenty-eight Dartmouth students participated in the study, broken into two equal groups: engineering students and novices. Engineering students had taken at least one mechanical engineering course and an advanced physics course, whereas novices had not taken any college-level engineering or physics classes. The study was comprised of three tests, which focused on how structures are built and assessed participants’ understanding of Newton’s third law–for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Newton’s third law is often used to describe the interactions of objects in motion, but it also applies to objects that are static, or nonmoving: all of the forces in a static structure need to be in equilibrium, a principle fundamental to understanding whether a structure will collapse under its own weight or whether it can support more weight.

At the start of the study, participants were provided with a brief overview of the different types of forces in mechanical engineering. In an fMRI scanner, they were presented with images of real-world structures (bridges, lampposts, buildings, and more) and were asked to think about how the forces in a given structure balanced out to keep the structure in equilibrium. Then, participants were prompted with a subsequent image of the same structure, where arrows representing forces were overlaid onto the structure. Participants were asked to identify if the Newtonian forces had been labeled correctly in this diagram. Engineering students (intermediate learners) answered 75 percent of the diagrams correctly and outperformed the novices, who answered 53.6 percent correctly.

Source: Your brain activity can be used to measure how well you understand a concept