Investigating How Undergraduate Students Use Their Understanding of Conservation of Energy across the Disciplines of Chemistry, Physics, and Engineering

该项目旨在通过提高我们对如何更好地跨学科整合本科STEM教育的理解，为国家利益服务。传统上，大学课程是按学科划分的。相比之下，STEM劳动力需要协作，使具有不同学科专业知识的专业人员能够解决跨学科问题。为了深入了解如何促进跨学科合作，该项目将研究大学生如何在化学、物理和工程等学科中发展和运用他们对能量守恒的理解。学生访谈和课堂观察将被收集和分析，以发现不同的学科背景如何支持或阻碍学生将一个学科学到的思想应用到另一个学科的能力。此外，该项目将探讨学生用来解决这些问题的策略。最后，研究结果将用于制定指导方针，教师可以使用这些指导方针来帮助学生发展对能源概念的跨学科理解。该项目将研究普渡大学学生用来解决涉及热力学第一定律，能量守恒的问题的认知资源。该研究将利用知识碎片和动态转移框架来研究学生在化学、工程和物理课程中第一定律概念的横向转移。“熟悉的环境”将由学生目前就读的学科课程来定义。研究目标是：(1)识别学生在处理熟悉学科背景内外的第一定律能量转移问题时激活的认知资源；(2)比较和对比学生在三个学科之间以及在化学、物理和工程的上下级课程之间使用的资源；(3)确定学生在熟悉的学科背景内外解决第一定律问题的能力在低年级和高年级课程之间的差异。为了实现这些目标，项目团队将收集课堂观察，并与参加课程的STEM专业学生进行思考问题的访谈。对于访谈，团队将开发一组学科第一定律问题，这些问题代表了与化学、物理或工程相关的背景下相同的基本概念问题。每个提示上下文的变化将通过使用特定学科的系统、语言和符号来完成。在面试过程中，STEM专业的学生将被要求回答一个违纪问题和一个违纪问题，并在过渡阶段对这两个问题进行比较。每门课程的课堂观察将为访谈分析得出的主题提供信息，并允许对学生推理和教学实践之间的联系做出假设。研究结果将在学术出版物和国家会议上传播。此外，该团队将利用这些发现为STEM教师制定跨学科指导方针，这些指导方针将通过网络研讨会传播，以支持从业者在其课程中为能源和物质概念开发量身定制的教学材料。该项目的成功与否将由一个外部咨询委员会进行评估。该项目有可能通过确定学科指导对学生理解热力学第一定律的影响，并记录学生用于有效跨越学科界限的生产资源和策略的类型，为STEM社区做出贡献。此外，它还将为STEM教育工作者制定指导方针，以促进对能源的跨学科理解。本项目由美国国家科学基金会改善本科STEM教育计划：教育与人力资源项目支持，该项目支持研究和开发项目，以提高所有学生STEM教育的有效性。通过参与学生学习轨道，该计划支持有前途的实践和工具的创建，探索，实施和研究。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project seeks to serve the national interest by enhancing our understanding of how undergraduate STEM education may be better integrated across disciplines. College courses are traditionally separated by discipline. In contrast, the STEM workforce requires collaboration to enable professionals with expertise in different disciplines to solve interdisciplinary problems. To gain insight on how to promote interdisciplinary collaboration, the project will study how college students develop and use their understanding of conservation of energy across the disciplines of chemistry, physics, and engineering. Student interviews and classroom observations will be collected and analyzed to discover how different disciplinary contexts may support or hinder students’ ability to apply ideas learned in one discipline to a different discipline. In addition, the project will explore the strategies students use to solve such problems. Finally, the results of the research will be used to develop guidelines that instructors can use to assist students in developing an interdisciplinary understanding of energy concepts.This project will study the cognitive resources that Purdue University students use to address problems involving the first law of thermodynamics, conservation of energy. The research will leverage Knowledge In Pieces and Dynamic Transfer frameworks to study students’ horizontal transfer of first law concepts across chemistry, engineering, and physics courses. “Familiar contexts” will be defined by the disciplinary course in which a student is currently enrolled. The research objectives are to: (1) identify the cognitive resources students activate when addressing first law energy transfer problems inside and outside familiar disciplinary contexts; (2) compare and contrast the resources students use across the three disciplines, as well as across lower and upper division courses in chemistry, physics and engineering; and (3) determine how students’ abilities to solve first law problems inside and outside familiar disciplinary contexts differ between lower division and upper division courses. To accomplish these objectives, the project team will collect classroom observations and conduct think-aloud problem-solving interviews with STEM majors enrolled in the courses. For the interviews, the team will develop sets of disciplinary first law problems that represent the same base conceptual problems with contexts relevant to chemistry, physics, or engineering. The variation in context for each prompt will be accomplished by using discipline-specific systems, language, and notation. During the interviews, STEM majors will be asked to address an in-discipline prompt and an out-of-discipline prompt and to compare the two prompts in a scaffolded transfer phase. Classroom observations in each course will inform the themes derived from the interview analyses and allow hypotheses to be made regarding connections between student reasoning and teaching practices. Results will be disseminated in scholarly publications and at national meetings. In addition, the team will use the findings to develop interdisciplinary guidelines for STEM instructors that will be disseminated via networking workshops to support practitioners in developing tailored instructional materials for energy and matter concepts in their courses. The success of the project will be evaluated by an external advisory board. The project has the potential to contribute to the STEM community by identifying the effects of disciplinary instruction on student understanding of the first law of thermodynamics and documenting the types of productive resources and strategies students use to effectively cross disciplinary boundaries. In addition, it will generate guidelines for STEM educators to promote interdisciplinary understanding of energy. This project is supported by the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program: Education and Human Resources, which supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, implementation of and research on promising practices and tools.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.