Department of Education and Center for Engineering Education and Outreach, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155, USA.
CBE Life Sci Educ. 2013 Jun 1;12(2):274-86. doi: 10.1187/cbe.12-11-0185.
Students' epistemological views about biology--their ideas about what "counts" as learning and understanding biology--play a role in how they approach their courses and respond to reforms. As introductory biology courses incorporate more physics and quantitative reasoning, student attitudes about the role of equations in biology become especially relevant. However, as documented in research in physics education, students' epistemologies are not always stable and fixed entities; they can be dynamic and context-dependent. In this paper, we examine an interview with an introductory student in which she discusses the use of equations in her reformed biology course. In one part of the interview, she expresses what sounds like an entrenched negative stance toward the role equations can play in understanding biology. However, later in the interview, when discussing a different biology topic, she takes a more positive stance toward the value of equations. These results highlight how a given student can have diverse ways of thinking about the value of bringing physics and math into biology. By highlighting how attitudes can shift in response to different tasks, instructional environments, and contextual cues, we emphasize the need to attend to these factors, rather than treating students' beliefs as fixed and stable.
学生关于生物学的认识论观点——他们对什么是学习和理解生物学的看法——在他们对待课程和回应改革的方式中发挥着作用。随着基础生物学课程越来越多地融入物理和定量推理，学生对生物学中方程作用的态度变得尤为重要。然而，正如物理教育研究中所记录的那样，学生的认识论并不总是稳定和固定的实体；它们可以是动态的和依赖于上下文的。在本文中，我们研究了对一名基础生物学学生的采访，她在采访中讨论了在她的改革生物学课程中使用方程的问题。在采访的一部分中，她表达了一种听起来根深蒂固的对方程在理解生物学中作用的消极立场。然而，在采访的后期，当讨论另一个生物学话题时，她对方程的价值持更为积极的态度。这些结果突出了一个特定的学生可以对将物理和数学引入生物学的价值有多种不同的思维方式。通过强调态度如何根据不同的任务、教学环境和背景线索发生变化，我们强调需要关注这些因素，而不是将学生的信念视为固定不变的。
