Department of Biology
UNCG Biologist Dr. Bruce Kirchoff wins Botanical Society of America Award
Dr. Bruce Kirchoff has won the 2007 Botanical Society of America Education Booth Exhibit Competition Award. This award supports Dr. Kirchoff’s highly innovative program Image Quiz, an active visual learning approach to plant identification. Programs in the Image Quiz family are designed to rapidly and efficiently help users become visual experts. Unlike novices, visual experts are able to quickly recognize patterns. This allows chess masters to recognize meaningful chess configurations, and plant systematists to quickly and accurately identify plants. The Image Quiz programs help users achieve this mastery in a fraction of the time that is normally required. They do this by adapting learning techniques from areas of cognitive psychology concerned with visual expertise. Programs in the Image Quiz family are designed to promote holistic processing, the visual processing mode used by experts. They do so through a series of active learning activities. Active learning engages brain areas associated with visual expertise, while passive learning does not. The training techniques are based on research protocols that were used to define holistic processing. Image Quiz adapts these protocols to a variety of visual domains.
The central program in the Image Quiz family is Woody Plants of the Southeastern United States: A Field Course on CD, which was published in 2008 by Missouri Botanical Garden Press. Copies of the program can be purchased at the following link http://www.mbgpress.info/index.php?task=id&id=08025.
Prototypes of the following programs have also been developed: Amino – A program to teach chemical intuition through the three dimensional structure of the amino acids; WholeMath – A visual introduction to mathematical equations and graphs; Lupine – A research application that was developed in collaboration with Dr. Ellen Simms (Department of Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley) as a means of character discovery in Lupinus seed coats.
September, 2008