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

到2050年，增加农业生产以满足90亿人口的需求，以及照顾日益复杂的神经和心血管健康问题的老龄化人口，这些复杂的社会问题要求未来的科学家、医生和相关卫生专业人员发展有机体生理学方面的专业知识。生理学和其他学科一样，要想成为某一领域的专家，需要具备识别、理解和运用该学科原理进行有效推理的能力。在他们的大学生涯中，理科生经常依靠死记硬背而不是基于原则的推理来解决问题，这导致了上下文约束思维，无法建立健全的理解。例如，这些学生可以列出肌肉收缩的步骤，但无法预测当肌肉蛋白质发生突变时会发生什么。该项目将开发一个“学习进程”，以记录大学生如何随着时间的推移发展越来越复杂的基于原理的推理，从而在生物学入门和解剖学和生理学课程中理解动物和植物的生理学。基于这种学习过程，项目团队还将开发可通过计算机评分的开放式评估问题。总的来说，这些工具将有可能改变大学生学习生理学的方式，并显著提高他们的理解质量和解决相关问题的能力。该项目名为“本科生理学原理推理发展的学习进展”（LeaP UP），由教育和人力资源核心研究计划支持，该计划资助STEM学习和学习环境的基础研究，扩大STEM参与和STEM劳动力发展。LeaP UP项目将开发一个学习过程，描述本科生如何在生理学中利用通量（流向梯度）和质量平衡（质量守恒）发展基于原理的推理。然后，学习进程将指导构建反应评估和相关计算机评分模型的创建，教师可以使用这些模型来确定学生在理解范围中的位置。该项目团队将利用自然语言处理和文本分析方面的前沿技术来创建计算机程序，以准确预测专家如何对学生对概念构建反应评估的反应进行评分。这些自动评分方法将迅速对全国范围内大量大学生的回答进行评分，并允许调查人员绘制出学生从社区学院的本科生物学和预科联合健康课程到大型研究型大学的学生理解水平的全国趋势。因此，所开发的工具将为未来重新设计本科生理学课程提供一个组织框架。

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.