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

合作研究：阐明人类中心思维在本科生物教育中的复杂作用

• 批准号: 2000923
• 负责人: Laura Burrus
• 金额: $ 59.99万
• 依托单位: San Francisco State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-10-01 至 2024-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2000923&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Untangling; Complex; Role

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.

该项目旨在通过改善本科生物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概念进行基础研究来实现这一目标。人类中心思维是一种特殊的直觉思维，它以人类的方式理解生物世界，导致人们倾向于将人类视为生物学上的例外，或者通过与人类进行类比来推理其他生物体。思考可能该项目打算从三个角度研究这个问题：1）来自不同背景的学生将人类中心观念带入生物课堂的程度如何不同。使用以人类为中心的语言的生物学概念可能有助于和/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以人类为中心的语言 这项研究有可能通过发现特定的认知理解系统为 NSF EHR 的使命做出贡献。可能会相互作用通过正式的课堂教学来帮助和/或阻碍科学学习。该项目将利用认知科学家和基于学科的教育研究人员之间成功的长期合作来调查直观理解的教育后果。这些研究人员之前的工作揭示了之间的系统关系。生物学的直觉、非正式思维模式，包括目的论、本质主义和人类中心思维，以及揭示学生对生物学概念的误解。 ,生物学教师在课堂上广泛而频繁地使用人类中心语言表明，至少有一些教师看到了这种思维的教学价值。此外，尽管该项目的研究人员发现两个不同城市机构的学生之间存在类似的人类中心思维和误解，但人类中心思维一直是这样的。因此，该项目旨在探讨来自农村背景的学生的人类中心思维与生物学误解之间的关系，深入探讨人类中心框架如何促进学习非常重要。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）因此，该项目旨在通过实验性地呈现以不同方式构建的生物学概念并评估由此产生的学习和认知，来研究人类中心框架对生物学学习的影响。最后，尽管有广泛的证据表明教师讲座中存在以人类为中心的语言，但教师有意识地使用此类语言作为教学策略的程度尚不清楚，因此，该项目旨在评估教师对其使用的元认知意识。这项研究的结果有望为建立一个重要的生成性理论框架提供信息，该框架整合了认知科学和基于学科的科学教育研究中相互独立但理论上相互依赖的探究路线。该项目是东北大学概念组织、推理和教育实验室（CORE Lab）和东北大学概念组织、推理和教育实验室（CORE Lab）共同努力的成果。科学教育旧金山州立大学的合作与评估实验室 (SEPAL) 得到了 EHR 核心研究 (ECR) 计划的支持，该计划支持推进 STEM 学习和学习环境的基础研究、扩大 STEM 的参与以及 STEM 劳动力发展的工作。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。