Exploring Biological Evidence: Helping Students Understand the Richness and Complexity of Evidentiary Constructs in Biology

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This proposal was submitted in response to EHR Core Research (ECR) program announcement NSF 15-509. The ECR program of fundamental research in STEM education provides funding in critical research areas that are essential, broad and enduring. EHR seeks proposals that will help synthesize, build and/or expand research foundations in the following focal areas: STEM learning, STEM learning environments, STEM workforce development, and broadening participation in STEM. The ECR program is distinguished by its emphasis on the accumulation of robust evidence to inform efforts to (a) understand, (b) build theory to explain, and (c) suggest interventions (and innovations) to address persistent challenges in STEM interest, education, learning, and participation. The proposed study will explore trajectories of development in high school and undergraduate students' understanding of evidence in the context of biology teaching and learning. One of the difficulties experienced by many science learners is that they do not fully understand the evidence base that underpins contemporary science. This study will examine students' developing understanding of evidence in the context of biology learning. This research will contribute to fundamental knowledge on STEM learning and STEM learning environments by providing information on trajectories of development in students' understanding and use of evidence as a central part of their learning in biology through the secondary and post-secondary years. The project will also provide information on how variations in how teachers and instructional materials support students' understanding and reasoning about evidence influence this development. The instructional resources developed as part of this project (e.g., grade band appropriate teacher guides and exemplars of supported assignments and assessments) will be of direct value to biology educators. The outcomes of this study will help educators better prepare students who want to pursue careers in science, including research careers. Furthermore, knowledge developed by the project may support the development of scientific literacy and participation in evidence-based decision making around public policy on scientific issues among citizens.The project will use a design-based research approach to achieve the following objectives: a) Develop a conceptual analysis of varied facets of disciplinary evidence that are important to evolutionary thinking in biology learning; b) Describe trajectories of learning in high school and undergraduate students' understanding and use of biological evidence for evolution; c) Examine how variations in instructional scaffolding relate to patterns of student learning within each grade band; and d) Develop design knowledge to facilitate integration of disciplinary evidence scaffolding in high school and undergraduate biology instruction. First, data will be collected on what students know and learn about biological evidence in the context of routine biology instruction. Subsequently the team will integrate instructional scaffolds that foster more nuanced and multifaceted understandings of biological evidence. Two variations will be examined: 1) Generic evidence scaffolds will remind students of different aspects of using evidence in science (e.g. "refer to all the evidence when constructing an explanation"), but without explicit links to relevant disciplinary knowledge for each aspect. 2) disciplinary evidence scaffolds will explicitly remind students of key disciplinary knowledge related to each aspect of evidence. The project will use a mixed method approach, combining qualitative and quantitative cognitive science techniques to collect and analyze data from a) student learning artifacts, b) pre and posttests of biology content knowledge, and their understanding and use of evidence in biology, c) videotaped classroom lessons, and d) interviews with teachers and students. These methods will allow for quantitative comparisons of group performance across the two instructional conditions and supplement these comparisons with rich descriptive data about how students learn in varied instructional contexts.