Investigating the influence of informal understandings about biology on formal learning of biological concepts

ECR项目强调基础STEM教育研究，这将产生该领域的基础知识。投资在至关重要、广泛和持久的关键领域：STEM学习和STEM学习环境，扩大STEM参与，以及STEM劳动力发展。本项目将整合发展认知科学和科学教育中STEM学习的研究，探讨非正式生物学的认知方面如何促进或阻碍正式生物学概念的实现。这项研究将重点关注生物系学生中常见的误解，这些误解可能不是源于概念本身的复杂性，而是源于对科学世界根深蒂固的非正式理解方式。它还将测试关于大学教师使用的语言在加强这种认识方式方面的作用的假设，并调查非正式生物学思想随着正式生物学知识的获得而发生的变化。该项目将针对多个层次的大学生和教职员工。研究样本将包括100名进入生物学专业和非生物学专业的学生，100名即将毕业的生物学专业和非生物学专业的学生，40名教职员工，以及东北大学和旧金山州立大学的非理科教职员工。这个跨学科项目将汇集认知科学家和科学教育研究人员，研究四个具体目标：(1)研究认知识解在正式生物学解释中的应用；(2)调查大学生物学教学语言的性质；(3)实验操作认知识解在教学语言中的运用；(2)考察了非正式解释生物推理的传统认知科学测度的变化。研究人员将通过课堂教学录音、前后调查、挑战陈述评估、概念清单和实验室实验，在研究的不同阶段从研究参与者那里收集数据。从这些来源的数据分析得出的结果将促进认知心理学和基于学科的科学教育研究的交叉知识。如果这项工作的发现澄清了非正式生物学思维与正式生物科学学习之间的关系，它将有助于为理解生命科学知识的获取建立一个新的理论框架。因此，这项研究将对本科阶段的生命科学教学产生直接影响，并从根本上改变教师教授学生特别难以学习的生物学概念的方式。

The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that will generate foundational knowledge in the field. Investments are made in critical areas that are essential, broad and enduring: STEM learning and STEM learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development. This project will integrate research on STEM learning in developmental cognitive science and science education to investigate how cognitive aspects of informal biology facilitate or impede the attainment of formal biological concepts. The study will focus on misconceptions common among biology students that may stem not from the complexity of the concepts themselves, but from deeply held informal ways of understanding the scientific world. It will also test hypotheses about the role of language used by college faculty in reinforcing such ways of knowing, and investigate changes in informal biological thought with the acquisition of formal biological knowledge. The project will target college students and faculty members at multiple levels. The study sample will include 100 entering biology majors and non-majors, 100 graduating biology majors and non-majors, 40 faculty members and a comparable sample of non-science faculty members at Northeastern University and San Francisco State University.This interdisciplinary project will bring together cognitive scientists and science education researchers to study four specific aims to: (1) examine the use of cognitive construals in formal biological explanations; (2) investigate the nature of instructional language used in university biology; (3) experimentally manipulate the use of cognitive construals in instructional language; and (2) examine changes on traditional cognitive science measures of informal construal based biological reasoning. Data will be collected from study participants at various points of the study through audio recordings of classroom teaching sessions, pre/post surveys, challenge statement assessments, concept inventories, and laboratory experiments. Results emerging from analysis of data from these sources will advance knowledge at the intersection of cognitive psychology and disciplined-based science education research. If findings from this work clarify there is a relationship between informal biological thought and formal biological science learning, it will help establish a new theoretical framework for understanding the acquisition of knowledge in the life sciences. As such, the research will have direct implications for life science teaching at the undergraduate level and fundamentally change the way instructors teach biological concepts that are particularly difficult for students to learn.