Undergraduate biology educators strive to understand how to best teach students the concepts of climate change. The root of this understanding is the establishment of what students know about climate change. This research aims to describe undergraduate biology students’ conceptions of climate change and their argument practices and associated cognitive biases in how they think about the topic. We used qualitative conception interviews to obtain data from 26 American biology undergraduate students who predicted how climate change would affect a forested ecosystem after an average of 1° increase in Fahrenheit (0.5°C change) over 25 years. Through deductive coding, we found the majority of students’ predictions agreed with expert ideas. However, the students used various argument strategies (i.e., Reasoning and Cognitive Biases) in defending their choices, including Ecological Explanations, Observations, Anchoring, and Contrast Effects.
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Punnett Squares or Protein Production? The Expert–Novice Divide for Conceptions of Genes and Gene Expression
Concepts of molecular biology and genetics are difficult for many biology undergraduate students to master yet are crucial for deep understanding of how life works. By asking students to draw their ideas, we attempted to uncover the mental models about genes and gene expression held by biology students ( n = 23) and experts ( n = 18) using semistructured interviews. A large divide was identified between novice and expert conceptions. While experts typically drew box-and-line representations and thought about genes as regions of DNA that were used to encode products, students typically drew whole chromosomes rather than focusing on gene structure and conflated gene expression with simple phenotypic outcomes. Experts universally described gene expression as a set of molecular processes involving transcription and translation, whereas students often associated gene expression with Punnett squares and phenotypic outcomes. Follow-up survey data containing a ranking question confirmed students’ alignment of their mental models with the images uncovered during interviews ( n = 156 undergraduate biology students) and indicated that Advanced students demonstrate a shift toward expert-like thinking. An analysis of 14 commonly used biology textbooks did not show any relationship between Punnett squares and discussions of gene expression, so it is doubtful students’ ideas originate directly from textbook reading assignments. Our findings add to the literature about mechanistic reasoning abilities of learners and provide new insights into how biology students think about genes and gene expression.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1757477
- PAR ID:
- 10353791
- Editor(s):
- Offerdahl, Erika
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CBE—Life Sciences Education
- Volume:
- 20
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1931-7913
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.21-01-0004
