Research

As students engage in this year-long peer-to-peer mentoring and research program, we will use a qualitative approach to track students’ changing culturally-relevant mentoring skills and their ability to engage in research that incorporates key principles of participatory action research, including shared decision-making, legitimation of various forms of knowledge including lived experiences, and an orientation toward collective action and social change.

Undergraduate learning assistants (ULAs) that teach different STEM disciplines will participate in a year-long fellowship aimed at building their critical consciousness i.e., their ability to recognize structures and systems that result in inequitable STEM learning experiences, as well as their commitment and ability to challenge the sources of these inequities. Through interviews, surveys, and reflective journals, we aim to assess ULAs’ evolving critical consciousness as well as their changing conceptions of equity and the impacts on their teaching practice.

The "BroadView" research initiative seeks to learn what works best and why, to test “high impact” practices for Study Abroad, and in a framework where diversity & inclusion is posited to serve a relevant role. Thus, we seek to examine how different variations in programs may impact outcomes, measured by professional instruments for cultural learning gains (e.g. MSD and IDI, Hammer et al 2011). For example, is active foreign language study a high-impact practice, or immersion with locals via local universities and homestay, or perhaps the extent to which the culture is dramatically different than one’s own? In addition, might a high-impact practice for Study Abroad be more diverse teams? Abroad cohorts are generally less diverse than university-wide, so examining the impact of more diverse cohorts is essential. 

Modell (2000) identified “general models” (i.e., physiological principles/core concepts) in physiology that could serve as a cognitive framework for students to use to explain a variety of seemingly-distinct processes. In this project, we describe how students’ reason using two of these general models: the principle of flux (i.e., movement of substances described by Ohm’s, Fick’s, Poiseuille's Laws) and principle of mass balance (i.e., Conservation of Mass). We also explore how the use of these two principles support students' transfer of reasoning across physiological systems.

Selected publications for this project:

Doherty, J.H., Scott, E.E., Cerchiara, J.A., Jescovitch, L.N., Mcfarland, J., Haudek, K.C., & Wenderoth, M.P. (2023).  What a difference in pressure makes: A framework describing undergraduate students’ reasoning about bulk flow down pressure gradients. CBE Life Sciences Education. https://www.lifescied.org/doi/10.1187/cbe.20-01-0003

Doherty, J. H., Cerchiara, J. A., Scott, E. E., Jescovitch, L. N., McFarland, J., Haudek, K. C., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2023). Oaks to arteries: The Physiology Core Concept of flow down gradients supports transfer of student reasoning. Advances in Physiology Education. https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/advan.00155.2022

Doherty, J. H., Cerchiara, J. A., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2023). Undergraduate students' neurophysiological reasoning: What we learn from the attractive distractors students select. Advances in Physiology Education. https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/advan.00128.2022

Scott, E. E., Cerchiara, J., McFarland, J. L., Wenderoth, M. P., & Doherty, J. H. (2023). How students reason about matter flows and accumulations in complex biological phenomena: An emerging learning progression for mass balance. Journal of Research in Science Teaching. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tea.21791 

Many undergraduates, including those from minoritized populations, leave science because they feel there is too heavy an emphasis on memorization or insufficient guidance on complex topics (Seymour & Hunter, 2019). This project focuses on how students reason through complex problems and how we can design instruction to better support students' use of scientific principles and causal mechanistic reasoning. We use interviews, focus groups and in-class observations to investigate how students use principle-based mechanistic reasoning to make sense of complex physiological problems. 

Students in introductory Physics, Biology and Calculus courses are often confronted with situations where they need to make sense of dynamical situations. For example, a typical introductory physics course requires students to understand how displacement velocity and acceleration change in relation to one another. On the other hand, in a biology class students reason about how influx/efflux rates relate to changes in the concentration of a substance in a compartment over time. It is well documented in the research literature that a productive way to make sense of dynamical situations is by thinking covariationally – holding in mind a sustained image of two quantities’ values simultaneously. We will investigate how Lyman Briggs students in introductory courses engage in covariational reasoning to make sense of dynamical situations and explore the impact of discipline on students’ covariational reasoning by collecting data across introductory Physics, Biology and Calculus course.

We integrated a career curriculum focused on engaging students in purpose-driven career exploration, building their professional communities and developing their career self-efficacy into our introductory biology class. Drawing on information from class assignments, surveys, and semi-structured interviews over the course of the semester we aim to analyze the impacts of this intervention on students’ STEM career identity and self-efficacy. 

This design experiment has two interwoven aims: (i) adding authentic science inquiry to labs, so-called "teams & streams" (Luckie et al 2012; cf.psl.msu.edu/teamstreams/), and ultimately developing Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CURE) in formerly traditional confirmatory classroom laboratories, and (ii) introducing aligned science inquiry to lecture too, to essentially "CURE lecture," so that lecture supports the laboratory. These efforts seek to restore authentic science practice to both lecture and lab experiences and continuously collect data to determine how the iterative changes impact student learning. In this new model, lectures become more like journal clubs where students closely examine research papers, and discuss experimental design and data analysis, as is common in the culture of research (Luckie et al 2017). CUREs provide a more diverse population of students with the opportunity to become legitimate participants in scientific research. CURE lectures, optimally connected to associated CURE lab experiences, may help a much wider range of students benefit even more so. 

This effort brings together STEM and humanities faculty into a formal study of interdisciplinary teaching and learning. The focus is an investigation into methods and impacts of interwoven “STEM + humanities” courses designed to help students gain interdisciplinary skills, e.g. an ability to view topics through different disciplinary lenses. Early findings suggest students appear to see a faculty member as a model of only a single discipline, thus, interdisciplinary learning is aided by the presence of multiple instructors. This, combined with a small cohort model which was found most effective, may also be an ideal way to support success for first-generation and underrepresented minority (URM) students. cf.psl.msu.edu/braid/

Building and studying the impact of web-based concept map apps that enable students in large introductory science classes to visualize their thinking and receive immediate formative feedback. When software provides immediate feedback, students tend to perform thoughtful revisions which they did not do otherwise, and evidence gathered supports that visual modeling can elevate underperforming students to narrow achievement gaps. cf.psl.msu.edu/ctools/