ECR Projects

Explore past and current fundamental STEM education research projects across the three research areas that NSF's EDU Core Research (ECR) program funds, as well as across ECR funding types. Other search filters draw from both NSF's data and the ECR Hub's hand coding of award abstracts.

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

Effective Years: 2023-2026

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.