The purposes of this study are to promote and understand how undergraduate students learn foundational biology ideas in introductory biology courses. It will implement and study an innovative approach, which has students learn biological explanations by modeling phenomena as biologists do. The approach directs students to think about structures, behaviors and functions in nature, and to write these out and discuss them. This study will explore in detail student reasoning while they do this and how they learn. The project has potential not only to advance the field's ability to measure student competencies that are valued in recent science education standards documents (e.g., NGSS), but also to advance the field's understanding of how student "modeling ability" develops in a particular discipline. In this way, it can provide an important foundation for other research on the learning of modeling practices in science. Moreover, because the innovations take place in an introduction to biology course and introduction to biology is required for a large number of college majors, the project can be transformative for a large number of students across the country.
This study will be conducted in a pre-designed undergraduate biology course across four universities, two public and two private, serving diverse populations. The aims are: (1) propose systems thinking skills needed by biology students, by (a) getting feedback from academics, and reviewing; (2) to examine more closely student thinking during their activities by (a) recording group discussions, (b) conducting clinical interviews with a subset of students, and (c) collecting student drawings in response to different prompts than they have used previously that help the instructors better understand what students are thinking; (3) conduct open-ended comparisons between other assessments and their assessments of student models; (4) compare outcomes when students are provided different visual representations as feedback (split-plot design); and (5) make comparisons between different demographic groups.
