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

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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.