Nathaniel Niosco will present his master's thesis defense "Instructional Framing and Student Learning of Community Interactions" at 8:30 a.m.Monday, July 18, 2016, in Hardin Hall 207.
His abstract:
To understand the complex systems and concepts of ecology requires a foundation of knowledge that students often gain in the classroom. The purpose of this research was twofold. First, I wanted to understand the differences between students who used surface reasoning skills and students who used deep reasoning skills to develop the foundational knowledge of community interactions. Second, I wanted to understand how two types of instructional framing may affect students’ ability to apply knowledge between multiple contexts.
In the first study, undergraduate introductory biology students were given pre-instruction and post-instruction assessments that tested their ability to explain the effects of disturbances within a food web. Findings from this study suggest that when learning a new subject, students use a combination of surface and deep reasoning to solve problems and surface reasoning students have the potential to meet or exceed the same standards as deep reasoning students. In the second study, students were taught food web concepts and reasoning skills using either bounded framing or expansive framing methods. Expansive framing is an instructional method designed to help students understand that the concepts and skills taught in a single context are applicable in multiple scenarios.
In a follow-up session, students were asked questions about the knowledge gained from the prior session and asked to reason about the effects of food web perturbations. Findings from the second study suggest that compared to bounded framing, expansive framing does not significantly affect the transfer of reasoning skills between contexts. The findings also suggest that students transferred some reasoning skills from the first session and applied the skills to the second session when prompted to reason about disturbances in a food web.
More details at: http://go.unl.edu/77cj