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A Problem-Sorting Task Detects Changes in Undergraduate Biological Expertise over a Single Semester

Calls for undergraduate biology reform share similar goals: to produce people who can organize, use, connect, and communicate about biological knowledge. Achieving these goals requires students to gain disciplinary expertise. Experts organize, access, and apply disciplinary knowledge differently tha...

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Autores principales: Hoskinson, Anne-Marie, Maher, Jessica Middlemis, Bekkering, Cody, Ebert-May, Diane
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: American Society for Cell Biology 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5459239/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28408406
http://dx.doi.org/10.1187/cbe.16-05-0175
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author Hoskinson, Anne-Marie
Maher, Jessica Middlemis
Bekkering, Cody
Ebert-May, Diane
author_facet Hoskinson, Anne-Marie
Maher, Jessica Middlemis
Bekkering, Cody
Ebert-May, Diane
author_sort Hoskinson, Anne-Marie
collection PubMed
description Calls for undergraduate biology reform share similar goals: to produce people who can organize, use, connect, and communicate about biological knowledge. Achieving these goals requires students to gain disciplinary expertise. Experts organize, access, and apply disciplinary knowledge differently than novices, and expertise is measurable. By asking introductory biology students to sort biological problems, we investigated whether they changed how they organized and linked biological ideas over one semester of introductory biology. We administered the Biology Card Sorting Task to 751 students enrolled in their first or second introductory biology course focusing on either cellular–molecular or organismal–population topics, under structured or unstructured sorting conditions. Students used a combination of superficial, deep, and yet-uncharacterized ways of organizing and connecting biological knowledge. In some cases, this translated to more expert-like ways of organizing knowledge over a single semester, best predicted by whether students were enrolled in their first or second semester of biology and by the sorting condition completed. In addition to illuminating differences between novices and experts, our results show that card sorting is a robust way of detecting changes in novices’ biological expertise—even in heterogeneous populations of novice biology students over the time span of a single semester.
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spelling pubmed-54592392017-06-12 A Problem-Sorting Task Detects Changes in Undergraduate Biological Expertise over a Single Semester Hoskinson, Anne-Marie Maher, Jessica Middlemis Bekkering, Cody Ebert-May, Diane CBE Life Sci Educ Article Calls for undergraduate biology reform share similar goals: to produce people who can organize, use, connect, and communicate about biological knowledge. Achieving these goals requires students to gain disciplinary expertise. Experts organize, access, and apply disciplinary knowledge differently than novices, and expertise is measurable. By asking introductory biology students to sort biological problems, we investigated whether they changed how they organized and linked biological ideas over one semester of introductory biology. We administered the Biology Card Sorting Task to 751 students enrolled in their first or second introductory biology course focusing on either cellular–molecular or organismal–population topics, under structured or unstructured sorting conditions. Students used a combination of superficial, deep, and yet-uncharacterized ways of organizing and connecting biological knowledge. In some cases, this translated to more expert-like ways of organizing knowledge over a single semester, best predicted by whether students were enrolled in their first or second semester of biology and by the sorting condition completed. In addition to illuminating differences between novices and experts, our results show that card sorting is a robust way of detecting changes in novices’ biological expertise—even in heterogeneous populations of novice biology students over the time span of a single semester. American Society for Cell Biology 2017 /pmc/articles/PMC5459239/ /pubmed/28408406 http://dx.doi.org/10.1187/cbe.16-05-0175 Text en © 2017 A.-M. Hoskinson et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2017 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0). “ASCB®” and “The American Society for Cell Biology®” are registered trademarks of The American Society for Cell Biology.
spellingShingle Article
Hoskinson, Anne-Marie
Maher, Jessica Middlemis
Bekkering, Cody
Ebert-May, Diane
A Problem-Sorting Task Detects Changes in Undergraduate Biological Expertise over a Single Semester
title A Problem-Sorting Task Detects Changes in Undergraduate Biological Expertise over a Single Semester
title_full A Problem-Sorting Task Detects Changes in Undergraduate Biological Expertise over a Single Semester
title_fullStr A Problem-Sorting Task Detects Changes in Undergraduate Biological Expertise over a Single Semester
title_full_unstemmed A Problem-Sorting Task Detects Changes in Undergraduate Biological Expertise over a Single Semester
title_short A Problem-Sorting Task Detects Changes in Undergraduate Biological Expertise over a Single Semester
title_sort problem-sorting task detects changes in undergraduate biological expertise over a single semester
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5459239/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28408406
http://dx.doi.org/10.1187/cbe.16-05-0175
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