Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry and STEM Transformation Institute, Florida International University, Miami, FL 33199.
Department of Chemistry, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824.
CBE Life Sci Educ. 2022 Jun;21(2):ar35. doi: 10.1187/cbe.21-10-0301.
Introductory courses are often designed to cover a range of topics with the intent to offer students exposure to the given discipline as preparation to further their study in the same or related disciplines. Unfortunately, students in these courses are often presented with an overwhelming amount of information that may not support their formation of a usable coherent network of knowledge. In this study we conducted a mixed-method sequential exploratory study with students co-enrolled in General Chemistry II and Introductory Biology I to better understand what students perceived to be the "take-home" messages of these courses (i.e., core ideas) and the connections between these courses. We found that students identified a range of ideas from both courses; further analysis of students' explanations and reasoning revealed that, when students talked about their chemistry ideas, they were more likely to talk about them as having predictive and explanatory power in comparison with reasons provided for their biology big ideas. Furthermore, students identified a number of overlapping ideas between their chemistry and biology courses, such as interactions, reactions, and structures, which have the potential to be used as a starting place to support students building a more coherent network of knowledge.
入门课程通常旨在涵盖一系列主题，旨在让学生接触给定的学科，为在同一学科或相关学科进一步学习做准备。不幸的是，这些课程的学生通常会接触到大量的信息，这些信息可能无法支持他们形成一个可用的连贯知识网络。在这项研究中，我们对同时修读普通化学 II 和生物学入门 I 的学生进行了混合方法顺序探索性研究，以更好地了解学生对这些课程（即核心思想）的“带回家”信息的看法，以及这些课程之间的联系。我们发现，学生从两门课程中都确定了一系列的想法；对学生解释和推理的进一步分析表明，当学生谈论他们的化学想法时，他们更有可能将其视为具有预测和解释力，而不是他们生物学大想法的原因。此外，学生还确定了他们的化学和生物学课程之间的一些重叠的想法，如相互作用、反应和结构，这些想法有可能成为支持学生构建更连贯的知识网络的起点。
