Collaborative Research: From the learner's perspective: Unpacking the why and how of model-based learning about biological systems

本研究的目的是促进和了解本科生如何在生物学入门课程中学习基础生物学思想。它将实施和研究一种创新的方法，让学生像生物学家那样通过模拟现象来学习生物学解释。该方法引导学生思考自然界中的结构、行为和功能，并将它们写出来并进行讨论。这项研究将详细地探索学生在这样做的同时进行推理以及他们是如何学习的。该项目不仅有可能提高该领域衡量学生能力的能力，这些能力在最近的科学教育标准文件(例如，NGSS)中得到重视，而且还可以促进该领域对特定学科中学生“建模能力”发展的理解。这样，可以为其他科学建模实践学习研究提供重要的基础。此外，由于这些创新发生在生物导论课程中，而生物导论是大量大学专业的必修课，因此该项目可能会对全国各地的大量学生产生变革。这项研究将在一门预先设计的本科生物学课程中进行，涉及四所大学，两所公立大学和两所私立大学，服务于不同人群。其目的是：(1)提出生物学学生所需的系统思维技能，通过(A)从学者那里获得反馈，并进行复习；(2)通过(A)记录小组讨论，(B)对部分学生进行临床访谈，以及(C)根据不同的提示收集学生的图画，以帮助教师更好地理解学生的想法；(3)对其他评估和他们对学生模型的评估进行开放式比较；(4)比较当学生被提供不同的视觉表征作为反馈时的结果(分裂图设计)；(5)对不同人口学群体进行比较。

The purposes of this study are to promote and understand how undergraduate students learn foundational biology ideas in introductory biology courses. It will implement and study an innovative approach, which has students learn biological explanations by modeling phenomena as biologists do. The approach directs students to think about structures, behaviors and functions in nature, and to write these out and discuss them. This study will explore in detail student reasoning while they do this and how they learn. The project has potential not only to advance the field's ability to measure student competencies that are valued in recent science education standards documents (e.g., NGSS), but also to advance the field's understanding of how student "modeling ability" develops in a particular discipline. In this way, it can provide an important foundation for other research on the learning of modeling practices in science. Moreover, because the innovations take place in an introduction to biology course and introduction to biology is required for a large number of college majors, the project can be transformative for a large number of students across the country. This study will be conducted in a pre-designed undergraduate biology course across four universities, two public and two private, serving diverse populations. The aims are: (1) propose systems thinking skills needed by biology students, by (a) getting feedback from academics, and reviewing; (2) to examine more closely student thinking during their activities by (a) recording group discussions, (b) conducting clinical interviews with a subset of students, and (c) collecting student drawings in response to different prompts than they have used previously that help the instructors better understand what students are thinking; (3) conduct open-ended comparisons between other assessments and their assessments of student models; (4) compare outcomes when students are provided different visual representations as feedback (split-plot design); and (5) make comparisons between different demographic groups.