Improving Undergraduate Scientific Explanations: Exploring the Role of Data Literacy Skills in Scientific Reasoning

本项目旨在通过研究如何通过教授本科生解释数据和应用科学推理来提高他们的科学解释能力，从而为国家利益服务。为此，该项目旨在制定易于实施的战略方法，以提高学生的数据素养技能。学生将通过一系列步骤来帮助他们识别和描述数据中的模式。额外的步骤将指导他们使用这些数据模式作为对正在调查的现象作出结论的证据。这些教学策略将在海洋学入门课程中进行测试，使用来自美国国家科学基金会资助的海洋观测倡议（OII）的数据集。通过利用与OII相关的教育工作者社区，这项工作的结果将直接与教授类似海洋学课程的人分享。因此，该项目预计将广泛采用它发现的对海洋学本科生最有效的策略。预计该项目的研究结果将适用于各学科，并可用于加强广泛的本科课程。因此，该项目计划提供对其开发的材料和数据集的在线访问，以便其他教育工作者可以很容易地采用或调整它们。本项目旨在通过培养学生的数据素养和推理能力来改善本科STEM教育，并最终提高他们构建科学准确解释的能力。本项目旨在探讨修改后的解释框架如何影响大学生科学解释技能的发展，并试图确定大学生在构建科学解释时遇到的具体挑战。具体而言，本项目将科学推理和数据素养这两个认知领域联系起来，以制定更有效的提高大学生科学素养的教学策略。该项目将采用一种融合的、多阶段混合方法的研究方法，其中将包括一项收集定量和定性数据的试点研究，这些数据将为项目的后期阶段提供信息。在教师的指导下，学生将使用OOI数据探索项目中适合教学的、可调整的数据可视化，以及互补的静态（如纸张）图形表示。本项目中使用的教学策略的设计和实施将被评估，以考虑未来教师寻求实施干预措施的专业发展需求。制定传播计划是为了确保科学教师、学习科学家和其他教育研究人员广泛分享有效的策略。本提案是为响应“致同事信：激励新机构参与改善本科STEM教育：教育和人力资源计划”（NSF 20-034）而提交的。NSF IUSE: EHR计划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，探索和实施。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 aims to serve the national interest by investigating how teaching undergraduate students to interpret data and apply scientific reasoning can improve their scientific explanations. To this end, the project aims to develop strategic, easy-to-implement approaches to enhance students’ data literacy skills. Students will be guided through a sequence of steps to help them recognize and describe patterns in data. Additional steps will guide them to use such data patterns as evidence for making conclusions about the phenomena under investigation. These teaching strategies will be tested in introductory oceanography courses, using data sets from the NSF-funded Ocean Observatories Initiative (OII). By leveraging the community of educators associated with OII, the results of this work will be directly shared with people who teach similar oceanography courses. As a result, the project anticipates wide adoption of the strategies it finds to be most effective for undergraduate oceanography students. The results of the project are also expected to be applicable across science disciplines and might be used to enhance a broad range of undergraduate courses. Consequently, the project plans to provide online access to the materials and data sets it develops, so that they can be easily adopted or adapted by other educators.This project is centered on improving undergraduate STEM education by building students’ data literacy and reasoning skills and, ultimately, enhancing their ability to construct scientifically accurate explanations. The project aims to investigate how a modified explanation framework could influence the development of undergraduate students' scientific explanation skills and seeks to identify the specific challenges undergraduate students experience when constructing scientific explanations. Specifically, this project will link two cognitive realms, scientific reasoning and data literacy, to develop more effective instructional strategies for improving undergraduate students’ science literacy. The project will follow a convergent, multiphase mixed methods research approach, which will include a pilot study to collect both quantitative and qualitative data that will inform the later stages of the project. Guided by their instructors, students will use pedagogically appropriate and adjustable data visualizations from the OOI Data Explorations project, together with complementary static (e.g., paper) graphical representations. The design and implementation of instructional strategies used in this project will be evaluated to consider the professional development needs of future instructors seeking to implement the interventions. Dissemination plans have been designed to ensure that effective strategies are shared broadly with science instructors, learning scientists, and other educational researchers. This proposal was submitted in response to the “Dear Colleague Letter: Stimulating Participation from Institutions New to the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Education and Human Resources Program" (NSF 20-034). The NSF IUSE: EHR Program 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, and implementation of 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.