What attributes of college biology students influence conceptual change?

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Understanding conceptual change in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education is critical for helping students develop deep understandings of complex ideas and models, and thus, for supporting undergraduate students' success and persistence in STEM fields. This EHR Core Research (ECR) project in the area of STEM learning will explore how multiple factors influence college biology students' conceptual change regarding evolution by natural selection. The project team will gather data from introductory biology courses across the United States, and expects to analyze responses from a total of about 14,000 students. The results of the analyses will provide evidence to support the refinement of theories of conceptual change regarding evolution by natural selection, suggest new ways to promote conceptual change in the classroom, and provide a model for future studies of conceptual change in STEM.The categories of variables that the project team will investigate include students' motivation, epistemic beliefs, cognitive and metacognitive strategies, formal operational reasoning, and biology content knowledge. Students in each of 60 different participating introductory biology classes will be administered the Conceptual Inventory of Natural Selection (CINS), as well as three other instruments (in different combinations) both pre- and post-instruction. This will support structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses of how the variables influence conceptual change in each individual class, as well as the development of an overarching model summarizing the ways in which all variables investigated influence undergraduate students' conceptual change in introductory biology.