Search for wildcards or unknown words Put a * in your word or phrase where you want to leave a placeholder. With our focus on procedural knowledge, we intentionally avoided an analysis of students’ declarative knowledge. As an early step in the written think-aloud, predicted what they expected the answer to be (i.e., what multiple-choice option they were looking for). Misunderstanding Content was exhibited when students stated incorrect facts from their long-term memory, made false connections between the material presented and biology concepts, or showed gaps in their understanding of a concept. » Evaluate the problem – Sales need to be increased by 20% 2. I mark it. Supplemental Table S1 shows the categories that resulted from our analytical process, including phase 1 notes, phase 2 categories, and phase 3 final category names as presented in this paper. General problem-solving procedures can be used to make some progress in reaching a solution to domain-specific problems, but a problem solver can get only so far with this type of thinking. 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Adding Information occurred when students recalled material that was pertinent to one of the multiple-choice options and incorporated that information into their explanations of why a particular option was wrong or right. In these cases, students demonstrated in one part of their written think-aloud that they understood the conditions for or components of a concept. When students corrected, they identified incorrect thinking they had displayed earlier in their written think-aloud and mentioned the correct way of thinking about the problem. FIGURE 4. We identified two additional errors that we classified as domain specific, Making Incorrect Assumptions and Misunderstanding Content. The call to reform undergraduate education involves shifting the emphasis in science classes away from rote memorization of facts toward learning core concepts and scientific practices (National Research Council [NRC], 2003; American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS], 2011). For example, in selecting option C for the stickleback problem (Figure 1), one student said, “E may be right, but I feel confident with C. I chose Answer C.” These procedures were coded as Opinion-Based Judgment. Then she analyzed the stickleback drawings and population table (Analyzing Domain-General Visual Representations) and explained why options were incorrect or correct based on her knowledge of species concepts (Checking). We have used the theoretical framework of domain-specific problem solving to investigate student cognition during problem solving of multiple-choice biology problems about ecology, evolution, and systems biology. Videos We asked three biology faculty members who were not investigators in this study to rank the Bloom’s levels of the problems we developed. Example #1 1. Pointed out that they had been thinking incorrectly about the problem earlier in the written think-aloud and now see the correct way to think about the problem. Bloom’s taxonomy helps educators think about the range of cognitive processes they could ask their students to perform and has served as an invaluable resource enabling educators to improve alignment between learning objectives, assessments, and classroom curricula (e.g., Crowe et al., 2008). In the final stages of SOLVEIT, students are asked to revise their initial solutions and to reflect on an expert’s solution as well as their own problem-solving process (Kim et al., 2015). Predicted probabilities of answering correctly are shown in Figure 3 for domain-general and hybrid procedures and Figure 4 for domain-specific procedures. While still in the same room, we categorized several written think-alouds independently. Analyzing Domain-Specific Visual Representation. Flash and JavaScript are required for this feature. Typically, students who asked a question did so repeatedly in a single written think-aloud. Problem-based learning (PBL) is an exciting way to learn biology and is readily incorporated into large classes in a lecture hall environment. Learn more », © 2001–2018
We also considered the frequency of problem-solving errors made by students solving lower-order and higher-order problems. Our research presents a categorization of problem-solving procedures that faculty can use in their teaching. First, we studied problems from a wider range of biology topics. Researchers and practitioners also need to discover how students develop the ability to use scientific practices.