What attributes of college biology students influence conceptual change?

理解科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）教育中的概念变化对于帮助学生深入理解复杂的思想和模型至关重要，因此，对于支持本科生在STEM领域的成功和坚持至关重要。STEM学习领域的EHR核心研究（ECR）项目将探讨多种因素如何影响大学生物学学生对自然选择进化的概念变化。该项目团队将从美国各地的生物学入门课程中收集数据，并预计将分析总计约1.4万名学生的反馈。分析结果将为支持自然选择进化的概念变化理论的完善提供证据，提出促进课堂概念变化的新方法，并为STEM概念变化的未来研究提供模型。项目团队将调查的变量类别包括学生的动机、认知信念、认知和元认知策略、形式运算推理和生物内容知识。在60个不同的生物学入门课程中，每个课程的学生都将在教学前和教学后使用自然选择概念清单（CINS）以及其他三种不同组合的工具。这将支持结构方程模型（SEM）分析变量如何影响每个班级的概念变化，以及发展一个总体模型，总结所有被调查的变量影响本科生在入门生物学中的概念变化的方式。

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.