Modeling the Conceptual Dynamics of College Students' Reasoning about Natural Selection

本项目旨在通过更好地了解学生如何在本科生物教育中思考自然选择的基本生物学概念，从而为国家利益服务。先前的研究已经确定，学生对自然选择的思考可能会因问题的具体特征而有很大差异，比如生物的类型或被选择的特征。了解学生思维的这种变化发生的时间和原因对生物教育者和课程设计者来说非常重要。通过访谈和分析学生的书面解释，项目团队将确定学生在回应不同的问题背景和提示时使用了哪些知识元素。这项工作将确定学生在思考自然选择时使用的知识元素，描述不同知识元素和上下文方面之间的关系，并探索这些模式的共性。研究结果将帮助教育工作者识别学生思维的各个方面，并设计课程，帮助学生激活和整合他们的思维，从而提高他们对自然选择的理解。本项目将通过建立基于资源的认知模型，研究情境对生物学本科生自然选择推理的影响。具体目标是识别和表征学生在自然选择推理中使用的概念资源，建立可以解释为什么不同资源在不同环境中被激活的模型，并测试我们识别的环境方面是否可以用来预测常见的推理模式。首先，为了确定学生自然选择推理的资源和激活模式，项目团队将对来自塔夫茨大学和邦克山社区学院的入门级生物学学生进行临床访谈。面试提示将通过有意改变和干扰问题情境来考察学生时刻思维的动态，从而探索学生思维中的动态和情境敏感性。访谈的个案研究分析将用于展示资源利用的新机制，访谈的跨个案分析将识别学生推理的共同模式。接下来，项目团队将通过向两个机构的更多学生展示写作提示和收集书面解释来测试所开发模型的预测。项目团队将操纵提示中提供的上下文和信息，以检查不同的提示是否系统地引出不同的推理模式。这种方法将允许项目团队测试他们在跨案例分析中发现的关联的预测强度，以确定共同的动态和稳定性。该项目的成功与否将由一组研究人员进行评估，这些研究人员是基于资源的建模专家和学生对自然选择的推理。项目的研究结果将分发给有学问的科学家以及在大学一级教授进化论的教育工作者。这个项目有潜力为认知动力学的理论知识和环境在塑造认知中的作用做出贡献。它也有可能改变生物教学的本质，帮助教师预测和注意到学生在思考自然选择时可能激活的知识，并通过课程设计有意地抽出和建立机会来整合学生思维的不同方面。本项目由美国国家科学基金会EDU核心研究（ECR）项目支持。ECR项目强调在该领域产生基础知识的基础STEM教育研究。投资在至关重要、广泛和持久的关键领域：STEM学习和STEM学习环境，扩大STEM参与，以及STEM劳动力发展。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 better understanding how students think about the foundational biological concept of natural selection in undergraduate biology education. Prior work has established that student thinking about natural selection can vary greatly depending on the specific features of questions students are asked, such the type of organism or the trait that is under selection. Understanding when and why this variation in student thinking arises is important for biology educators and curriculum designers. Using interviews and analyses of students’ written explanations, the project team will identify which knowledge elements students use in response to different problem contexts and prompts. This work will identify the knowledge elements students use when thinking about natural selection, characterize the relationships between different knowledge elements and aspects of context, and explore the commonalities of those patterns. The results will help educators identify various facets of student thinking and design curricula that can help students activate and integrate their thinking, and thus improve their understanding of natural selection.This project will study the influence of context on undergraduate biology students’ reasoning about natural selection by building resource-based models of cognition. The specific objectives are to identify and characterize the conceptual resources students use in reasoning about natural selection, to build models that can explain why different resources are activated in different contexts, and to test whether the aspects of context we identify can be used to predict common patterns of reasoning. First, to identify sets of resources and patterns of activation in students’ reasoning about natural selection, the project team will conduct clinical interviews with introductory-level biology students from Tufts University and Bunker Hill Community College. The interview prompts will be designed to explore dynamics and context-sensitivities in students’ thinking by intentionally varying and perturbing the problem contexts to examine the dynamics of students’ moment-to-moment thinking. Case-study analyses of interviews will be used to present novel mechanisms of resource use and cross-case analyses of interviews will identify common patterns in students’ reasoning. Next, the project team will test the predictions of the models developed by presenting writing prompts to a larger number of students at both institutions and collecting written explanations. The project team will manipulate context and information provided in prompts to examine whether different prompts systematically elicit different patterns of reasoning. This approach will allow the project team to test the predictive strength of the associations they find in cross-case analyses to identify common dynamics and stabilities. The success of the project will be evaluated by a team of researchers who are experts in resource-based modeling and students’ reasoning about natural selection. Project findings will be disseminated to learning scientists as well as to educators who teach evolution at the university level. This project has the potential to contribute to theoretical knowledge about cognitive dynamics and the role of context in shaping cognition. It also has the potential to change the nature of biology instruction by helping instructors anticipate and notice the knowledge that students are likely to activate when thinking about natural selection and through the design of curricula that intentionally draw out and build in opportunities to integrate different facets of students’ thinking.This project is supported by NSF's EDU Core Research (ECR) program. The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. Investments are made in critical areas that are essential, broad and enduring: STEM learning and STEM 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.