The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has outlined four themes that define science literacy; these are systems, models, constancy and change, and scale.  More recently, the National Research Council has released the framework for K-12 science education that includes “Scale, Proportion, and Quantity”.  Our research has already shown that scale literacy is a better predictor for success in a general chemistry course and integrating scale as a theme in the undergraduate general chemistry curriculum has led to increases in student final exam performance.  With the ultimate goal to generalize this research across STEM disciplines, we have begun looking into how students within the biological sciences understand scale and concepts related to scale and how this relates to the understanding of other important biology concepts.  Activities that targeted these goals were developed through this research or adapted from the work of Gail Jones. One activity was a one-on-one interview setting with both novice and experienced students that was designed to measure students’ absolute and relative scaling abilities over many orders of magnitude.  Students were asked to create “bins” to sort objects and then given 15 cards containing the names of objects to sort into their bins.  After sorting the objects, students were also asked to order the objects by size and place the objects on a logarithmic number line.  Preliminary data collected from this activity shows that students are less comfortable working with objects and units that fall outside of the visible realm and that students frequently operate within a very narrow range of scale, typically centered around the height of an adult.  The complete analysis of this activity and the implications for these findings as they relate to developing scale-themed instruction for the biological sciences will be presented.<br/>

Investigation of absolute and relative scaling conceptions in an anatomy and physiology course

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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