A major goal of STEM education is to help students develop a robust and coherent understanding of scientific principles. However, numerous studies have shown that students emerge from college level courses with misconceptions and fragmented ideas from all scientific disciplines. While most of these studies focus on student understanding of ideas within a single discipline, the National Research Council (NRC) report on discipline-based education research (DBER) emphasizes the need to investigate student understanding of the ideas that span scientific disciplines. In this study, we conducted 36 semi-structured student interviews to develop an understanding of how students in introductory college chemistry and biology courses connect their knowledge of the two disciplines. We asked students to identify the big ideas, overall themes (crosscutting concepts), types of things they are asked to do (scientific practices) for each of the courses, and to make connections using these ideas between the two disciplines. In this poster, we will discuss the big ideas that students identified for each discipline and the connections between them.

Investigating students’ perception of their general chemistry and introductory biology courses.

2019 Spring National Meeting

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.