Contextual features of assessments can influence the ideas students draw from and the ways they assemble knowledge. We used a mixed-methods approach to explore how surface-level item context impacts student reasoning. In study 1, we developed an isomorphic survey to capture student reasoning about fluid dynamics, a crosscutting phenomenon, in two item contexts (blood vessels, water pipes), and administered the survey to students in two different course contexts: human anatomy and physiology (HA&P) and physics. We observed a significant difference in two of 16 between-context comparisons and a significant difference in how HA&P students responded to our survey compared with physics students. In study 2, we conducted interviews with HA&P students to explore our findings from study 1. Using the resources and framing theoretical framework, we found that HA&P students responding to the blood vessel protocol used teleological cognitive resources more frequently compared with HA&P students responding to the water pipes version. Further, students reasoning about water pipes spontaneously introduced HA&P content. Our findings support a dynamic model of cognition and align with previous work suggesting item context impacts student reasoning. These results also underscore a need for instructors to recognize the impact of context on student reasoning about crosscutting phenomena.

Vol. 22, No. 2

June 01, 2023

Metrics

Downloads & Citations

Downloads: 1020

History

Submitted: 4 November 2021

Revised: 13 January 2023

Accepted: 24 January 2023

Information

© 2023 T. Slominski et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2023 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 4.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0).

This investigation was conducted in compliance with the Institutional Review Board regulations (protocols no. SM18224, no. SM20237, and no. SM15258). We thank the students who participated in our study. Without their participation, this study could not have been conducted. We thank members of the Momsen lab for many valuable discussions. We also thank the University of Maryland Physics Education Research Group, especially Edward (Joe) Redish, for their insightful discussions and feedback on this project. We thank Rachel Barker and Hanna Berger for their contributions made during the NDSU REU program. This study was supported by the NDSU Graduate School through the STEM Education PhD Fellowship, the National Science Foundation (DUE 1560142), and the North Dakota Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research Infrastructure Improvement Program–Doctoral Dissertation Assistantship.

PDF download