Bridging the gaps: How students seek disciplinary coherence in introductory physics for life science

Abstract

Students in one discipline often receive their scientific training from faculty in other disciplines. As a result of tacit disciplinary differences, especially as implemented in courses at the introductory college level, such students can have difficulty in understanding the nature of the knowledge they are learning in a discipline that they do not identify as their own. We developed a course in introductory physics for life science (IPLS) students that attempts to help them cross disciplinary boundaries. By analyzing student reasoning during recitation sections and interviews, we identified three broad ways in which students in our course meaningfully crossed boundaries: (i) by unpacking biochemical heuristics in terms of underlying physical interactions, (ii) by locating both biochemical and physical concepts within a mathematical bridging expression, and (iii) by coordinating functional and mechanistic explanations for the same biological phenomenon. Drawing on episodes from case-study interviews and in-class problem-solving sessions, we illustrate how each of these types of boundary crossing involves the coordination of students' conceptual and epistemological resources from physics, chemistry, and biology in distinct but complementary ways. Together, these boundary crossing categories form a theoretical framework for classifying student coherence seeking. We explore how the IPLS course helps our life science students fill in the gaps that exist between traditional introductory courses, by finding and exploring questions that might otherwise fall through disciplinary cracks. By identifying these types of explanatory coherence, we hope to suggest ways of inviting life science students to participate in physics and see physics as a tool for making sense of the living world.

Exploring Students’ Explanations of Energy Transfer and Transformation

“…This lack of explanatory coherence may be expected in novice learners but points to the need for more opportunities for them to recognize, differentiate, and coordinate different explanatory models. 52 We do not believe that the different non-normative ideas expressed by students during our interviews can be thought of as stable alternative conceptions. Most participants struggled, hesitated, and expressed doubts about their explanations.…”

“…Non-normative explanations generated by students who expressed a similar mechanistic schema often differed in the type of macroscopic mechanism that was invoked to explain energy transfer such as heat emission, radiation (heat waves), and mass transfer (electron transfer). This lack of explanatory coherence may be expected in novice learners but points to the need for more opportunities for them to recognize, differentiate, and coordinate different explanatory models …”

“…The alternative constructions generated by participants should not be seen as unproductive necessarily, as they can serve as a base for the construction of normative understandings as discussed by other researchers. 40,52 ■ IMPLICATIONS Participants in our study were students in a General Chemistry course sequence that followed an alternative curriculum that emphasizes the development of mechanistic reasoning. 47,48 They represented students with different levels of performance measured by their final grades.…”

Exploring the Coherence of Student Reasoning when Responding to Questionnaires on Thermally Activated Phenomena

“…Percentages of students simultaneously using from one to four reasoning categories (including a category for not-given answers) in answering the post-instruction questionnaire Sikorski and Hammer (2017) define coherence in building explanations as the process of "trying to build meaningful, mutually consistent relationships between information". This coherence is a fundamental feature of students' learning, as it can allow them to coordinate different perspectives in ways that provide new insight or understanding (Geller et al, 2019;Knorr Cetina, 1999;Sikorski & Hammer, 2017). The coherence in answering increases markedly after instruction.…”

What is interdisciplinarity? Views from students and professors in a non-major intro physics course

“…For example, our data strongly suggest that authentic interdisciplinary gestures (examples, applications, and connections) serve as sources of engagement and interest, but as Geller et al [6] and Nair and Sawtelle [22] remind us, engagement, interest, and relevance are complex constructs with varied meanings. Not only would adapting such IPLS research to the General Physics context provide useful information to support research-based reformation of this course, but also, given the centrality of physics-biology as their interdisciplinary context, it is worth investigating how the results of [6,22] as well as [12,23,24] transfer and compare to different interdisciplinary contexts.…”