Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada.
Cooperative Forestry Research Unit, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469.
CBE Life Sci Educ. 2019 Mar;18(1):ar6. doi: 10.1187/cbe.17-07-0118.
The excessive "jargon" load in biology may be a hurdle for developing conceptual understanding as well as achieving core competencies such as scientific literacy and communication. Little work has been done to characterize student understanding of biology--specific jargon. To address this issue, we aimed to determine the types of biology jargon terms that students struggle with most, the alignment between students' perceived understanding and performance defining the terms, and common errors in student-provided definitions. Students in two biology classes were asked to report their understanding of, and provide definitions for, course-specific vocabulary terms: 1276 student responses to 72 terms were analyzed. Generally, students showed an overestimation of their own understanding. The least accurate self-assessment occurred for terms to which students had substantial prior exposure and terms with discordant meanings in biology versus everyday language. Students were more accurate when assessing their understanding of terms describing abstract molecular structures, and these were often perceived as more difficult than other types of terms. This research provides insights about which types of technical vocabulary may create a barrier to developing deeper conceptual understanding, and highlights a need to consider student understanding of different types of jargon in supporting learning and scientific literacy.
生物学中过多的“行话”可能会阻碍学生对概念的理解，以及影响他们达到科学素养和交流等核心能力。目前，很少有研究致力于描述学生对生物学专业术语的理解。为了解决这个问题，我们旨在确定学生最难以理解的生物学术语类型、学生对术语的理解和表现之间的一致性，以及学生提供的定义中的常见错误。我们要求两个生物学班的学生报告他们对特定课程词汇术语的理解，并为这些术语提供定义：对 72 个术语的 1276 个学生回答进行了分析。总的来说，学生对自己的理解存在高估。对于学生有大量先前接触的术语和生物学与日常语言含义不一致的术语，自我评估的准确性最低。学生在评估自己对描述抽象分子结构的术语的理解时更为准确，而且这些术语通常被认为比其他类型的术语更难。这项研究提供了关于哪些类型的技术词汇可能会成为深入理解概念的障碍的见解，并强调了在支持学习和科学素养方面，需要考虑学生对不同类型术语的理解。
