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.
