COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: Learning Progressions on the Development of Principle-based Reasoning in Undergraduate Physiology (LeaP UP)

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The complex societal problems of increasing agricultural production to meet the needs of 9 billion people by 2050, and caring for an aging population with increasingly more complex neurological and cardiovascular health issues require future scientists, physicians, and allied health professionals to develop expertise in organismal physiology. In physiology, as in other disciplines, becoming an expert in a field requires the abilities to recognize, understand and effectively reason using the principles of the discipline. During their college careers, science students often rely on rote memorization rather than principle-based reasoning to solve problems, and this leads to context-bound thinking that fails to build robust understandings. Such students can, for example, list the steps involved in muscle contraction, but cannot predict what will happen when a mutation is introduced in a muscle protein. This project will develop a "learning progression" to document how college students can develop more and more sophisticated principle-based reasoning over time to understand the physiology of animals and plants in both introductory biology and anatomy and physiology courses. Based on this learning progression, the project team will also develop open-ended assessment questions that can be scored via computer. Collectively, these tools will have the potential to transform how college students learn physiology, and to significantly enhance the quality of their resulting understanding and ability to solve related problems. The project, entitled Learning Progressions on the Development of Principle-based Reasoning in Undergraduate Physiology (LeaP UP), is supported by the Education and Human Resources Core Research Program, which funds fundamental research in STEM learning and learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development.The LeaP UP project will develop a learning progression that describes how undergraduate students develop principle-based reasoning in the use of flux (flow down gradients) and mass balance (Conservation of Mass) in physiology. The learning progression will then guide the creation of constructed response assessments and associated computer scoring models that instructors can use to determine where their students are along the spectrum of understanding. The project team will capitalize on cutting edge advances in natural language processing and text analysis to create computer programs to accurately predict how experts would score students' responses to the conceptual constructed-response assessments. These automated scoring methods will rapidly score responses from large numbers of college students nationwide and allow the investigators to map national trends in students levels of understanding of students as they move through their undergraduate Biology and pre-Allied Health curricula at community colleges to large research universities. Thus, the tools developed will provide an organizing framework for the future redesign of undergraduate physiology curricula.