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1. Students' interpretations of disciplinary convention with the first law of thermodynamics

   https://doi.org/10.1119/perc.2023.pr.Parobek  

   Parobek, Alexander P.; Towns, Marcy H. (October 2023, 2023 PERC Proceedings)

   Jones, Dyan; Qing X. Ryan, Qing X.; Pawl, Andrew (Ed.)

   The transfer of knowledge within and across disciplines remains a compelling challenge for modern STEM education and further research is needed to expand on the student-exhibited cognitive and affective gains achieved by innovative cross-disciplinary STEM instructional techniques. This study seeks to support crossdisciplinary STEM instruction and learning by investigating how students use the first law of thermodynamics, a crucial principle to the crosscutting concept of energy and matter, to bridge across disciplinary boundaries. An interview study was undertaken wherein chemistry-, engineering-, and physics-major students addressed a common set of conceptual prompts written with different field-specific conventions. This report focuses on students’ interpretations of the provided forms of the first law and work equations between prompts. Emergent findings demonstrate field-specific interpretations of arbitrary differences in convention and strong barriers to transfer. Derived implications inform suggestions for scaffolding across such disciplinary differences and for future work in this area. 

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2. Using Students’ Conceptual Models to Represent Understanding of Crosscutting Concepts in an NGSS-Aligned Curriculum Unit About Urban Water Runoff

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-021-09911-6  

   Fick, Sarah J.; McAlister, Anne M.; Chiu, Jennifer L.; McElhaney, Kevin W. (March 2021, Journal of Science Education and Technology)

   null (Ed.)

   Recent science education reforms, as described in the Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC, 2012), call for three-dimensional learning that engages students in scientific practices and the use of scientific lenses to learn science content. However, relatively little research at any grade level has focused on how students develop this kind of three-dimensional knowledge that includes crosscutting concepts. This paper aims to contribute to a growing knowledge base that describes how to engage students in three-dimensional learning by exploring to what extent elementary students represent the crosscutting concept systems and system models when engaged in the practice developing and using models as part of an NGSS-aligned curriculum unit. This paper answers the questions: How do students represent elements of crosscutting concepts in conceptual models of water systems? How do students’ representations of crosscutting concepts change related to different task-based scaffolds? To analyze students’ models, we developed and applied a descriptive coding scheme to describe how the students illustrated the flow of water. The results show important differences in how students represented system elements across models. Findings provide insight for the kinds of support that students might need in order to move towards the development of three-dimensional understandings of science content. 

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3. Bringing three-dimensional learning to undergraduate physics: Insight from an introductory physics laboratory course

   https://doi.org/10.1119/10.0009715  

   May, Jason M.; De Grandi, Claudia; Gerton, Jordan M.; Barth-Cohen, Lauren; Beehler, Adam; Montoya, Brianna (June 2022, American Journal of Physics)

   Three-dimensional learning (3DL) is an approach to science instruction that was developed for K-12 science education and that can provide guidance for improving undergraduate physics laboratories. In this paper, we describe efforts to comprehensively integrate 3DL into a sequence of undergraduate introductory physics for life sciences (IPLS) laboratory courses. This paper is tailored for introductory physics faculty interested in advancing their course's learning goals by simultaneously engaging students in experimental practices, scientific reasoning, and conceptual knowledge. We first review how several well-known laboratory curricula are already implicitly aligned with 3DL. We then describe our IPLS course sequence and show how each 3DL dimension—science and engineering practices, disciplinary core ideas, and crosscutting concepts—is integrated throughout the curriculum. To support implementation, we provide samples of our course documentation, a detailed account of our 3DL integration efforts, a guide to training and supporting teaching and learning assistants in a 3DL course, and a sample set of activities to guide students in participating in 3DL instruction in the supplementary material. 

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4. Affordances of Electrostatic Potential Maps in Promoting Use of Electronic Features and Causal Reasoning in Organic Chemistry

   https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.4c00500  

   Farheen, Ayesha; Demirdöğen, Betül; Chem, Bradley; Nelsen, Isaiah; Weinrich, Melissa; Lewis, Scott E (September 2024, Journal of Chemical Education)

   Instructional materials in organic chemistry include a wide variety of representations, such as chemical formulas, line-angle diagrams, ball-and-stick diagrams, and electrostatic potential maps (EPMs). Students tend to focus on explicit features of a representation while they are reasoning about chemical concepts. This study examined the affordances of electrostatic potential maps in students’ approaches when the maps were integrated into four foundational organic chemistry problems using an experimental design approach. First-semester organic chemistry students were surveyed from two different institutions, where they made predictions and explained their reasoning behind identifying an electrophilic site, predicting the product, selecting the faster reaction, and classifying a mechanism. Students were randomly assigned to one of four surveys that differed by the representation they were given for the prompts: chemical formula, line-angle diagram, ball-and-stick diagram, and EPM. Responses from students with EPMs were analyzed and compared to responses from students with the non-EPM representations. Results indicated that students with EPMs had higher performance depending on the problem. They were also more likely to cite electronic features such as electron density, nucleophilicity, etc., and were more likely to use causal reasoning in their explanations. This study offers evidence in support of affordances of EPMs in promoting students’ use of electronic features and causal reasoning. This evidence adds to the chemistry education literature by offering a potential means for promoting students’ use of electronic features and causal reasoning by incorporating EPMs into assessment items. Implications for instruction include using EPMs in both instruction and assessment as a tool to help students build skills around invoking electrostatics and causal reasoning to solve problems in organic chemistry. 

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5. Exploring the role of disciplinary knowledge in students’ covariational reasoning during graphical interpretation

   https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-024-00492-5  

   Altindis, Nigar; Bowe, Kathleen_A; Couch, Brock; Bauer, Christopher_F; Aikens, Melissa_L (July 2024, International Journal of STEM Education)

   Abstract BackgroundThis study investigates undergraduate STEM students’ interpretation of quantities and quantitative relationships on graphical representations in biology (population growth) and chemistry (titration) contexts. Interviews (n = 15) were conducted to explore the interplay between students’ covariational reasoning skills and their use of disciplinary knowledge to form mental images during graphical interpretation. ResultsOur findings suggest that disciplinary knowledge plays an important role in students’ ability to interpret scientific graphs. Interviews revealed that using disciplinary knowledge to form mental images of represented quantities may enhance students’ covariational reasoning abilities, while lacking it may hinder more sophisticated covariational reasoning. Detailed descriptions of four students representing contrasting cases are analyzed, showing how mental imagery supports richer graphic sense-making. ConclusionsIn the cases examined here, students who have a deep understanding of the disciplinary concepts behind the graphs are better able to make accurate interpretations and predictions. These findings have implications for science education, as they suggest instructors should focus on helping students to develop a deep understanding of disciplinary knowledge in order to improve their ability to interpret scientific graphs. 

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