College Students' Understanding of the Carbon Cycle: Contrasting Principle-Based and Informal Reasoning

Processes that transform carbon (e.g., photosynthesis) play a prominent role in college biology courses. Our goals were to learn about student reasoning related to these processes and provide faculty with tools for instruction and assessment. We created a framework illustrating how carbon-transformi...

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Veröffentlicht in:Bioscience 2011-01, Vol.61 (1), p.65-75
Hauptverfasser: Hartley, Laurel M, Wilke, Brook J, Schramm, Jonathon W, D'Avanzo, Charlene, Anderson, Charles W
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Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:Processes that transform carbon (e.g., photosynthesis) play a prominent role in college biology courses. Our goals were to learn about student reasoning related to these processes and provide faculty with tools for instruction and assessment. We created a framework illustrating how carbon-transforming processes can be related to one another during instruction by explicitly teaching students to employ principle-based reasoning—using, for example, laws of conservation of energy and matter. Frameworks such as ours may improve biology instruction more effectively than a strategy of cataloging alternate conceptions and addressing them individually. We created four sets of diagnostic question clusters to help faculty at 13 US universities assess students' understanding of carbon-transforming processes from atomic-molecular through ecosystem scales. The percentage of students using principle-based reasoning more than doubled from 12% to 27% after instruction, but 50% of students still poorly used principle-based reasoning in their responses, and 16% exhibited informal reasoning with no attempt to trace matter or energy.
ISSN:0006-3568
1525-3244
DOI:10.1525/bio.2011.61.1.12