Collaborative Research: Untangling the Complex Role of Anthropocentric Thinking in Undergraduate Biology Education

该项目旨在通过改进本科生物学教育来服务于国家利益。它将通过开展基础研究，研究生物学生的直觉思维如何帮助和/或阻碍他们在STEM学习环境中学习生物学概念。该项目专注于以人类为中心的思维，这是一种特殊的直觉思维，以人类的术语来理解生物世界。以人类为中心的思想导致了一种倾向，即认为人类在生物学上是例外的，或者通过类比人类来推理其他生物。之前由美国国家科学基金会赞助的研究结果表明，以人类为中心的思维在大学生学习生物科学的过程中可能扮演着复杂的角色。本项目旨在从三个角度来研究这个问题：1)不同背景的学生在将以人类为中心的概念带入生物课堂的程度上有何不同。2)使用以人为中心的语言教授生物学概念如何有助于和/或阻碍学生的学习。3)教师如何在自己的教学中有意无意地使用以人为中心的语言。这项研究有可能通过发现特定的认知理解系统如何与正式的课堂教学相互作用来帮助和/或阻碍科学学习，从而为NSF的EHR任务做出贡献。该项目将利用认知科学家和以学科为基础的教育研究人员之间成功的长期合作来调查直觉理解的教育后果。这些研究人员以前的工作揭示了关于生物学的直觉、非正式思维模式之间的系统关系，包括目的论思维、本质论思维和以人类为中心的思维模式，以及揭示学生对生物概念的误解。它表明，与其他类型的直觉思维相比，以人类为中心的思维与生物学错误概念的联系更强烈、更一致。然而，生物学教师在课堂上广泛而频繁地使用以人类为中心的语言表明，至少一些教师看到了这种思想的教学价值。此外，尽管该项目的研究人员在两个不同城市机构的学生中发现了类似的以人类为中心的思维和误解，但来自农村背景的人的以人类为中心的思维被证明是减少的。因此，本项目旨在探讨农村背景学生的人类中心主义思维与生物学错误观念之间的关系。深入探讨以人类为中心的框架可能有助于学习正式的生物学概念(通过人类例子和类比)和/或产生错误概念(通过人类例外论)的方式是重要的。因此，该项目旨在通过实验呈现以不同方式构建的生物学概念，并评估由此产生的学习和误解，来调查以人类为中心的框架对生物学习的影响。最后，尽管有广泛的证据表明教师讲课中存在以人为中心的语言，但教师在多大程度上有意识地将这种语言作为一种教学策略尚不清楚。因此，本项目旨在评估教师在生物学解释中使用以人类为中心的语言的元认知意识。这项研究的结果有望为建立一个重要的、生成性的理论框架提供参考，该框架整合了认知科学和基于学科的科学教育研究中互不相连但在理论上相互依存的研究路线。它有可能将这一理解生命科学专业知识获取的理论框架转化为教学最佳实践，从而影响本科生生物学的教学方式。拟议的项目是东北大学概念组织、推理和教育实验室(CORE Lab)和旧金山州立大学科学教育伙伴关系和评估实验室(SEPAL)的联合努力，并得到EHR核心研究(ECR)计划的支持，该计划支持推进STEM学习和学习环境的基础研究、扩大STEM的参与和STEM劳动力发展的工作。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project aims to serve the national interest by improving undergraduate biology education. It will do so by conducting basic research on how the intuitive thinking of biology students helps and/or hinders their learning of biological concepts in STEM learning environments. The project focuses on anthropocentric thinking, a particular kind of intuitive thinking that anchors understanding of the biological world in human terms. Anthropocentric thinking results in a tendency to see humans as biologically exceptional or to reason about other organisms by analogy to humans. Previous NSF-sponsored findings show that anthropocentric thinking may have a complex role in how undergraduates learn biological science. This project intends to examine this issue from three perspectives: 1) How students from different backgrounds may vary in the degree to which they bring with anthropocentric conceptions to the biology classroom. 2) How teaching biology concepts using anthropocentric language might help and/or hinder student learning. 3) How faculty may intentionally or unintentionally use anthropocentric language in their own teaching. This research has the potential to contribute to the NSF EHR mission by discovering how specific systems of cognitive understanding may interact with formal classroom teaching to help and/or hinder science learning.This project will leverage a successful long-term collaboration between cognitive scientists and discipline-based education researchers to investigate the educational consequences of intuitive understandings. These investigators’ previous work revealed systematic relationships between patterns of intuitive, informal thought about biology, including teleological, essentialist, and anthropocentric thinking, as well as revealing misconceptions about biological concepts among students. It showed anthropocentric thinking is more strongly and consistently related to biological misconceptions than other types of intuitive thinking. However, widespread and frequent use of anthropocentric language by biology faculty in classrooms suggests that at least some instructors see pedagogical merit in such thinking. Moreover, although this project's researchers have found similar anthropocentric thinking and misconceptions among students in two different urban institutions, anthropocentric thinking has been shown to be reduced among people from rural backgrounds. Therefore, this project intends to probe relationships between anthropocentric thinking and biological misconceptions among students from rural backgrounds. It is important to explore in depth the ways in which anthropocentric framing may facilitate learning formal biology concepts (via human examples and analogies) and/or engender misconceptions (via human exceptionalism). Accordingly, the project aims to investigate the effects of anthropocentric framing on biology learning by experimentally presenting biology concepts framed in different ways and assessing resulting learning and misconceptions. Finally, although there is widespread evidence of anthropocentric language in faculty lectures, the degree to which instructors consciously employ such language as a pedagogical strategy is unknown. Therefore, this project seeks to assess faculty metacognitive awareness of their use of anthropocentric language in biology explanations. Results of this research are expected to inform the building of an important and generative theoretical framework integrating disconnected yet theoretically interdependent lines of inquiry in cognitive science and discipline-based science education research. It has the potential to translate this theoretical framework for understanding the acquisition of expertise in life sciences into pedagogical best practices and thus influence the way undergraduate biology is taught. The proposed project is a joint effort between the Conceptual Organization, Reasoning, and Education Laboratory (CORE Lab) at Northeastern University and the Science Education Partnership and Assessment Laboratory (SEPAL) at San Francisco State University, and is supported by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program, which supports work that advances fundamental research on STEM learning and learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development.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.