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

该项目旨在通过改善本科生物学教育来服务于国家利益。 它将通过对生物学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进行基础研究来做到这一点。该项目的重点是以人为中心的思维，一种特殊的直觉思维，以人类的方式来理解生物世界。人类中心主义思维导致了一种倾向，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。以前NSF赞助的研究结果表明，以自我为中心的思维可能在本科生如何学习生物科学方面起着复杂的作用。本研究拟从三个方面探讨此问题：1）不同背景的学生在生物课堂上的自我中心观念的程度如何不同。2)如何使用以语言为中心的语言教学生物学概念可能会帮助和/或阻碍学生的学习。3)教师如何在自己的教学中有意或无意地使用非中心语言。这项研究有可能有助于NSF EHR的使命，通过发现特定的认知理解系统如何与正式的课堂教学互动，以帮助和/或阻碍科学learning.This项目将利用认知科学家和学科为基础的教育研究人员之间的成功的长期合作，调查直观理解的教育后果。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，本质主义和以人为中心的思维，以及揭示学生对生物学概念的误解。研究表明，与其他类型的直觉思维相比，以自我为中心的思维与生物学误解的关系更为强烈和一致。 然而，生物学教师在课堂上广泛而频繁地使用以语言为中心的语言表明，至少有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的城市机构的学生中发现了类似的以自我为中心的思维和误解，但以自我为中心的思维在农村背景的人中有所减少。因此，本研究旨在探讨农村学生的生物学错误概念与自我中心思维之间的关系。重要的是要深入探讨以人为中心的框架可能有助于学习正式的生物学概念（通过人类的例子和类比）和/或产生误解（通过人类例外论）的方式。因此，该项目旨在通过实验呈现以不同方式构建的生物概念并评估由此产生的学习和误解，来研究以生物为中心的框架对生物学习的影响。最后，虽然有广泛的证据表明，教师的讲座中以语言为中心的语言，教师有意识地使用这种语言作为教学策略的程度是未知的。因此，本项目旨在评估教师的元认知意识，他们在生物学解释中使用以语言为中心的语言。本研究的结果，预计将通知一个重要的和生成性的理论框架，整合在认知科学和学科为基础的科学教育研究断开但理论上相互依赖的调查线的建设。它有可能将这一理论框架转化为教学的最佳实践，从而影响本科生物学的教学方式。该项目是概念组织、推理和教育实验室的共同努力（核心实验室）在东北大学和科学教育伙伴关系和评估实验室（SEPAL）在旧金山弗朗西斯科州立大学，并支持EHR核心研究（ECR）计划，支持工作，推进基础研究干学习和学习环境，扩大参与干，该奖项反映了NSF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 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.