Date of Award

2020

Publisher

North Dakota State University

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Awarded

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Program

Biological Sciences

Department

Biological Sciences

College

Science and Mathematics

Faculty Advisor

Momsen, Jennifer

Description

Across the United States, Human Anatomy and Physiology (HA&P) courses typically have some of the highest withdrawal and failure rates on college campuses. These high enrollment course typically serve as gate-keepers for those individuals with aspirations of entering the medical field. In light of the growing national shortage of healthcare professionals, there is a pressing need to improve the state of HA&P education at a national scale. The goal of this dissertation is to understand why undergraduate students struggle to succeed in HA&P courses. I leveraged multiple frameworks from biology education research, physics education research, and cognitive psychology to understand the source of student difficulty in HA&P. I used a mixed-methods approach to unpack how students reason about the complex phenomena covered in HA&P classes. The data presented here suggest student difficulties in HA&P are not the product of a culmination of individual conceptual difficulties. Rather, this work suggests students have difficulty reasoning with the many complex systems that are at the heart of HA&P curriculum. Students appear to frame these complex systems in a manner that activates reasoning strategies that are often in conflict with course goals. The findings from this work advocate for a dynamic view of student cognition that recognizes the implications of context features on student reasoning of complex systems.

Rights

NDSU policy 190.6.2

Rights Link

https://www.ndsu.edu/fileadmin/policy/190.pdf

Handle Identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/10365/32049

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