How students reason about matter flows and accumulations in complex biological phenomena: An emerging learning progression for mass balance

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a strong push to transform STEM education at K‐12 and collegiate levels to help students learn to think like scientists. One aspect of this transformation involves redesigning instruction and curricula around fundamental scientific ideas that serve as conceptual scaffolds students can use to build cohesive knowledge structures. In this study, we investigated how students use mass balance reasoning as a conceptual scaffold to gain a deeper understanding of how matter moves through biological systems. Our aim was to lay the groundwork for a mass balance learning progression in physiology. We drew on a general models framework from biology and a covariational reasoning framework from math education to interpret students' mass balance ideas. We used a constant comparative method to identify students' reasoning patterns from 73 interviews conducted with undergraduate biology students. We helped validate the reasoning patterns identified with >8000 written responses collected from students at multiple institutions. From our analyses, we identified two related progress variables that describe key elements of students' performances: the first describes how students identify and use matter flows in biology phenomena; the second characterizes how students use net rate‐of‐change to predict how matter accumulates in, or disperses from, a compartment. We also present a case study of how we used our emerging mass balance learning progression to inform instructional practices to support students' mass balance reasoning. Our progress variables describe one way students engage in three dimensional learning by showing how student performances associated with the practice of mathematical thinking reveal their understanding of the core concept of matter flows as governed by the crosscutting concept of matter conservation. Though our work is situated in physiology, it extends previous work in climate change education and is applicable to other scientific fields, such as physics, engineering, and geochemistry.

Ecological diversity methods improve quantitative examination of student language in short constructed responses in STEM

“…Coding is the most common approach for qualitative analysis in content based CRs in STEM, as it gives insight into student thinking by examining student produced text or words. In previous work with CRs, coding has reflected various frameworks in STEM, including cognitive models such as learning progressions (Jescovitch et al, 2021;Scott et al, 2022), the use of scientific skills (Uhl et al, 2021;Zhai et al, 2022), or the presence of key conceptual ideas Schonfeld, 2008, Sripathi et al, 2019;Noyes et al, 2020). Qualitative coding can be done by reading the responses or using text mining programs that use computer-based dictionaries and natural language processing to pull out themes from the text.…”

“…Constructed responses (CRs) are an increasingly used type of assessment that provide valuable insight to both instructors and researchers, as students express their understanding or demonstrate their ability using their own words (Birenbaum et al, 1992;Nehm and Schonfeld, 2008;Gerard and Linn, 2016). Through CRs, students reveal differing levels of performance, complex thinking, and unexpected language in a variety of STEM topics including evolution (Nehm and Reilly, 2007), tracking mass across scales (Sripathi et al, 2019), statistics (Kaplan et al, 2014), mechanistic reasoning in chemistry and genetics (Noyes et al, 2020;Uhl et al, 2022), and covariational reasoning (Scott et al, 2022). Due to their value and expanded use, it is increasingly important for assessment developers and researchers to have methods to carefully and quantitatively examine the language within CRs.…”

Individual variation in undergraduate student metacognitive monitoring and error detection during biology model evaluation

“…Physiology models were a particular challenge for students and confidence in physiology responses was significantly lower than other subject areas. Students may have recognized their limited knowledge of the represented physiology processes (Scott et al, 2023) affecting both accuracy (slightly) and confidence in their responses. While we can find nuance in the results, students' overall accuracy on ecology and physiology was similar to evolution and genetics, perhaps suggesting students were using domain-general error detection strategies to compensate for variance in knowledge.…”

“…Misconceptions around plants and their interactions with the atmosphere remain prevalent in university biology students (Parker et al, 2012). It is likely that students concurrently hold scientifically sound knowledge of these interactions and misconceptions about the matter flows and accumulations (Scott et al, 2023). Pedagogically, this plays an important role as we look to support students to critically evaluate their knowledge about these processes.…”

Using Test Question Templates to teach physiology core concepts

“…By that definition, misconceptions can be important, unimportant, or anywhere in between. In considering the numerous core-concept misconceptions that students may harbor ( 5 , 31 , 32 ), the conceptual frameworks can help us judge their relative importance. For example, for the conceptual framework of the Cell Membrane ( 9 ), an instructor might deem a misconception about tight junctions (CM2.4.1) less important than a misconception about the structure of the cell membrane as a whole (CM1), since the latter subconcept is at a higher level of the framework (i.e., in the language of Ref.…”