Identifying and Developing Students’ Ability to Reason with Concepts and Representations in Biology

Abstract

External representations (ERs) and their constituent symbolism are of enormous pedagogical value to instructors, especially in the teaching of the submicroscopic world of biology, inherent in disciplines such as biochemistry, immunochemistry, molecular biology and physiology. Whereas symbolic conventions are rigorously applied in physics and chemistry to enhance learning, this is not always true in biology where inappropriate use of symbolic language often leads to confusing ER designs and a range of conceptual, visual, and reasoning difficulties. In this chapter, we present a synthesis of research conducted by our group within these important areas of biology education. We commence by describing a model of seven factors affecting students' ability to interpret and learn from ERs. We then apply the model as a guiding theoretical framework in the classification of various cognitive skills or reasoning abilities, identified from a synthesis of literature. We also show how the model can inform the design of assessment tasks aimed at both assessing (summative) and guiding the development (formative) of students' ER-related reasoning ability. We then describe various student difficulties identified by our group. In particular, we focus on visual, reasoning, and conceptual difficulties related to the decoding and interpretation of the diverse symbolic language used to visually represent protein structure, selected biochemical and physiological processes, and in the communication of modern molecular biology. We then show how the seven-factor model can be used as an analytical tool for identifying the nature and source of the difficulties and for designing potential remediation strategies for addressing the difficulties. We conclude by discussing the implications of our research on the use of the CRM model for biology education practitioners and researchers in improving the learning, teaching and assessment of biology related to ERs.

Profil Kompetensi Representasional Mahasiswa Calon Guru Biologi Berdasarkan Kemampuan Representasi Mikroskopis Struktur Perkembangan Tumbuhan

“…Aspek kompetensi representasional yang diukur dalam penelitian ini meliputi: 1) kemampuan mentransformasi antar mode representasi yaitu dari representasi konkret ke mode representasi gambar 2D (Gilbert, 2008;Tsui & Treagust, 2013); mengkoding dan menginterpretasikan ciri-ciri struktur berdasarkan mode representasi gambar (Anderson, et al, 2013); menginterpretasikan representasi mikroskopis untuk membangun penjelasan pada tingkat representasi makroskopis (Kozma & Russel, 2008, Tsui & Treagust, 2013Anderson, et al, 2013). Pengumpulan data dalam penelitian ini dilakukan dengan teknik tes.…”

“…Berikutnya mereka diminta membuat penjelasan dengan representasi tingkat representasi mikroskopis. Analisis kemampuan mengkoding dan menginterpretasikan ciri-ciri struktur pada mode representasi gambar berdasarkan aspek ketepatan pelabelan dan kesesuaian dengan deskripsi ciri-ciri struktur (Anderson, et al, 2013). Taksonomi SOLO (Stalne, Kjellstrom, dan Utriainen, 2015) digunakan untuk menganalisis kemampuan menginterpretasikan representasi mikroskopis untuk membangun penjelasan pada tingkat representasi makroskopis.…”

Students' mental load, stress, and performance when working with symbolic or symbolic–textual molecular representations

“…To understand a given representation, students need to have conceptual knowledge relevant to the representation and to make sense of its constituent symbols, signs, codes, etc. (Anderson, Schönborn, Du Plessis, Gupthar, & Hull, ; Wu & Shah, ). However, numerous studies have revealed remarkable difficulties of students with complex representations, especially with chemical and molecular representations, such as structural formulas (for an overview see Taskin & Bernholt, ).…”

“…Finally, external (e.g., textual, visual) information and prior knowledge have to be integrated in an “active process of coherence formation” (Schnotz, , p. 84). Hence, understanding a representation requires both conceptual knowledge and knowledge about the mode and code of a representation (Anderson et al, ; Wu & Shah, ). Exactly these prerequisites were identified, besides an inadequate selection of information, as major problem areas of students with chemical formulas (Taskin & Bernholt, ).…”

Player–Game Interaction and Cognitive Gameplay: A Taxonomic Framework for the Core Mechanic of Videogames

“…Several possible explanations include context dependence, need for mental model realigning, need for increased mental processing for foregrounding of information, and need for new segmentation of experience in a new context. On the other hand, a change of context may require new representations, and considerable research in the cognitive sciences shows that different representations of the same information can help users understand and mentally model the information better [59][60][61][62]. Research is needed to investigate how different types of this element should be implemented in videogames to lead to desired cognitive gameplay.…”