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学教育来为国家利益服务。它将通过对生物学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学概念的学习方式来做到这一点。该项目的重点是以人为中心的思维，这是一种特殊的直观思维，从人类的角度来看，锚点理解生物学世界。以人类为中心的思维会导致人们倾向于将人类视为生物学上的特殊性，或者通过类似于人类来推理其他组织。以前的NSF赞助的发现表明，以人类为中心的思维可能在大学生学习生物科学的方式中起着复杂的作用。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如何在生物学课堂上以人为中心的概念带来的程度有所不同。 2）以求爱语言教授生物学概念如何有助于和/或阻碍学生学习。 3）教师在自己的教学中如何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如何与正规课堂教学相互作用以帮助和/或阻碍科学学习，从而为NSF EHR任务做出了贡献。该项目将利用认知科学家和基于纪律的教育研究人员之间成功的长期合作，以调查直觉理解的教育后果。这些研究者以前的工作揭示了关于生物学的直觉，非正式思想模式之间的系统关系，包括目的论，本质主义和以人为中心的思维，以及对学生之间生物学概念的误解。它显示以人类为中心的思维与其他类型的直觉思维相比，与生物学误解更加强烈，更始终如一。但是，生物学教师在课堂上宽度和经常使用以人类为中心的语言表明，至少有些讲师在这种思维中会看到教学优点。此外，尽管该项目的研究人员发现了两个不同城市机构中的学生中以人类为中心的思维和失误，但已证明在崎rough的背景的人中，以人为中心的思维也可以减少。因此，该项目打算探究以艰难背景的学生之间以人类为中心的思维与生物学误解之间的关系。重要的是要深入探索以人类为中心的框架促进形式生物学概念（通过人类的例子和类比）和/或引起误解（通过人类例外主义）的方式。根据该项目的说法，该项目旨在通过实验提出以不同方式构建的生物学概念并评估结果的学习和误解，从而研究以人类为中心的框架对生物学学习的影响。最后，尽管在教师讲座上有广泛的以人类为中心的语言的证据，但教师有意识地采用教学策略等语言的程度尚不清楚。因此，该项目旨在评估教师元认知对生物学解释中以人类为中心语言的意识。这项研究的结果预计将为建立一个重要且通用的理论框架建立，该框架整合了基于认知科学和基于学科的科学教育研究中与世的尚未相互依存的探究线。它有可能翻译这种理论框架，以理解生命科学专业知识的最佳实践，从而影响本科生物学的教学方式。 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任务，并通过评估诚实地认为，使用基金会的知识分子和更广泛的影响标准。