Search

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

R2431 --> The decades‐long movement to shift life science education, including physiology, toward students' conceptual understanding and away from rote memorization has had limited success. In an attempt to promote conceptual learning in physiology, over a decade ago we asked faculty what they thought the core concepts of physiology were. In this way, we identified 15 core concepts of physiology. Five of these (flow down gradients, homeostasis, cell‐cell communication, cell membrane, and mass balance) have been "unpacked" to create a conceptual framework for each. These concepts, and their conceptual frameworks, can be used in teaching, assessment, and aiding students to make sense of physiology. Students need opportunities to practice the application of these concepts (and the sub‐ideas present in the frameworks) if they are to use them successfully. Data from physiology faculty surveys have shown that in some departments, some core concepts (e.g., homeostasis) are addressed across the curriculum while others (e.g., mass balance) are not as consistently addressed. The core concepts, however, are applicable across essentially all topics and organ systems. Our purpose here is to illustrate that these core concepts apply "all over the place." We have mapped the five "unpacked" core concepts onto typical physiology topics (organ systems) which may be the subject of textbook chapters, units in a course, or an entire course. For each topic, we have identified one or more examples of a phenomenon or mechanism for which one of the core concepts is applicable. We show that within each organ system there are a number of opportunities to introduce and/or reinforce core concepts by giving students structured practice with them aligned to appropriate formative assessment. We also demonstrate that each of these five core concepts is applicable to many topics within in a physiology course or curriculum. We recognize that each physiology teacher will have to select those core concepts that she wants her students to master, and that not every core concept can or will be incorporated in every course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]