College Students' Understanding of the Carbon Cycle: Contrasting Principle-Based and Informal Reasoning

Processes that transform carbon (e.g., photosynthesis) play a prominent role in college biology courses. Our goals were to learn about student reasoning related to these processes and provide faculty with tools for instruction and assessment. We created a framework illustrating how carbon-transformi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Bioscience 2011-01, Vol.61 (1), p.65-75
Main Authors: Hartley, Laurel M, Wilke, Brook J, Schramm, Jonathon W, D'Avanzo, Charlene, Anderson, Charles W
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Academic Ability
active teaching
Atoms
Biology
Biosynthesis
Botany
Carbon cycle
Carbon cycle (Biogeochemistry)
Carbon dioxide
Climate change
College Students
Concept Formation
Conservation (Concept)
Conservation laws (Physics)
conservation of matter and energy
Core curriculum
DEPARTMENTS
Ecology
Education
Educational aspects
Elementary Secondary Education
Energy
Energy conservation
Higher Education
Inferences
Learning
Matter
misconceptions
Molecules
Photosynthesis
Plants
Posttests
Pretests
Principles
Reasoning
respiration
Science Education
Science Instruction
Scientific Literacy
Scientific Principles
Students
United States
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Summary:Processes that transform carbon (e.g., photosynthesis) play a prominent role in college biology courses. Our goals were to learn about student reasoning related to these processes and provide faculty with tools for instruction and assessment. We created a framework illustrating how carbon-transforming processes can be related to one another during instruction by explicitly teaching students to employ principle-based reasoning—using, for example, laws of conservation of energy and matter. Frameworks such as ours may improve biology instruction more effectively than a strategy of cataloging alternate conceptions and addressing them individually. We created four sets of diagnostic question clusters to help faculty at 13 US universities assess students' understanding of carbon-transforming processes from atomic-molecular through ecosystem scales. The percentage of students using principle-based reasoning more than doubled from 12% to 27% after instruction, but 50% of students still poorly used principle-based reasoning in their responses, and 16% exhibited informal reasoning with no attempt to trace matter or energy.
ISSN:0006-3568
1525-3244
DOI:10.1525/bio.2011.61.1.12