Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115-5000, USA.
CBE Life Sci Educ. 2012 Fall;11(3):209-15. doi: 10.1187/cbe.12-06-0074.
Many ideas in the biological sciences seem especially difficult to understand, learn, and teach successfully. Our goal in this feature is to explore how these difficulties may stem not from the complexity or opacity of the concepts themselves, but from the fact that they may clash with informal, intuitive, and deeply held ways of understanding the world that have been studied for decades by psychologists. We give a brief overview of the field of developmental cognitive psychology. Then, in each of the following sections, we present a number of common challenges faced by students in the biological sciences. These may be in the form of misconceptions, biases, or simply concepts that are difficult to learn and teach, and they occur at all levels of biological analysis (molecular, cellular, organismal, population, and ecosystem). We then introduce the notion of a cognitive construal and discuss specific examples of how these cognitive principles may explain what makes some misconceptions so alluring and some biological concepts so challenging for undergraduates. We will argue that seemingly unrelated misconceptions may have common origins in a single underlying cognitive construal. These ideas emerge from our own ongoing cross-disciplinary conversation, and we think that expanding this conversation to include other biological scientists and educators, as well as other cognitive scientists, could have significant utility in improving biology teaching and learning.
许多生物学科学领域的概念似乎特别难以理解、学习和成功教授。我们在这个专题中的目标是探讨这些困难可能不是源于概念本身的复杂性或不透明性，而是源于这些概念可能与心理学家几十年来研究的非正式、直观和根深蒂固的理解世界的方式相冲突。我们简要概述了发展认知心理学领域。然后，在以下每个部分中，我们提出了生物学专业学生在学习过程中经常遇到的一些共同挑战。这些挑战可能表现为误解、偏见，或者只是难以学习和教授的概念，它们出现在生物分析的所有层面（分子、细胞、个体、种群和生态系统）。接着，我们引入了认知构建的概念，并讨论了这些认知原则如何解释某些误解为何如此诱人，以及某些生物学概念为何对本科生如此具有挑战性。我们将论证看似不相关的误解可能源于单一的底层认知构建。这些想法源自我们自己正在进行的跨学科对话，我们认为，将这种对话扩展到包括其他生物学科学家和教育工作者以及其他认知科学家，可能会对改善生物学教学和学习产生重大作用。
