Putting the Pieces Together: Student Thinking about Transformations of Energy and Matter

Abstract

Research on student thinking from the pieces perspective reveals students’ independent, fluctuating ideas about metabolism.

Processing misconceptions: dynamic systems perspectives on thinking and learning

“…To elaborate on these ideas, I will draw heavily from the conceptual tools and vocabulary of the knowledge-in-pieces (KiP) theoretical framework and related resources-based models of cognition (diSessa, 1988(diSessa, , 1993Smith et al, 1994;Hammer, 1996;diSessa and Sherin, 1998;Hammer et al, 2005;Wittmann, 2006;Clark and Linn, 2013). KiP originated from efforts to model learners' intuitive reasoning in the domain of physics (diSessa, 1988(diSessa, , 1993 and has been broadly applied within science and math education and beyond (e.g., Clark, 2006;Wagner, 2006;Philip, 2011;Izsak, 2014;Barth-Cohen and Wittmann, 2016), though it has been relatively less common in biology education research (but see Southerland et al, 2001;Lira and Gardner, 2020;Bhatia et al, 2022;Gouvea et al, 2023;Slominski et al, 2023).…”

“…One emerging strand of work has begun to model how students activate and coordinate fine-grained resources in specific problemsolving contexts (e.g., Towns, 2019, 2021;Bhatia et al, 2022). For example, Bhatia et al (2022) studied students' reasoning about a set of problems related to enzyme-mediated metabolic reactions.…”

“…One emerging strand of work has begun to model how students activate and coordinate fine-grained resources in specific problemsolving contexts (e.g., Towns, 2019, 2021;Bhatia et al, 2022). For example, Bhatia et al (2022) studied students' reasoning about a set of problems related to enzyme-mediated metabolic reactions. One finding from this work is that students' intuitive interpretations of specific symbols (e.g., a dashed line and a negative sign) influenced the ideas they activated.…”

Metacognition and Problem Solving: How Self-Coaching Helps First-Year Students Move Past the Discomfort of Monitoring

“…All interviews were conducted over Zoom during the 2021-2022 academic year when participants had returned to the classroom. Participants (n=52) were asked to think aloud as they solved two challenging biochemistry problems (Figure 1) that have been previously published (Bhatia et al, 2022;Halmo et al, 2018;Halmo et al, 2020). We selected two challenging biochemistry problems for first-year students to solve because we know that students do not use metacognition unless they find a learning task challenging (Carr & Taasoobshirazi, 2008).…”

“…The problems we selected met this criterion because participants had not yet taken biochemistry. The biology problems were open-ended and asked students to make predictions and provide scientific explanations for their predictions about 1) non-covalent interactions in a folded protein for the Protein X Problem (Halmo et al, 2018;Halmo et al, 2020) and 2) negative feedback regulation in a metabolic pathway for the Pathway Flux Problem (Bhatia et al, 2022). To elicit student thinking after participants fell silent for more than five seconds, interviewers used the following two prompts: "What are you thinking (now)?"…”