Molly Bolger

Features of Knowledge Building in Biology: Understanding Undergraduate Students’ Ideas about Molecular Mechanisms

This article explores how undergraduate students integrate knowledge in molecular biology. Analysis of interviews with introductory-level and upper-division students revealed patterns in how students sorted and connected ideas about DNA transcription, translation, and replication. Findings include differences in the nature of how students connected ideas.

Teaching Real Data Interpretation with Models (TRIM): Analysis of Student Dialogue in a Large-Enrollment Cell and Developmental Biology Course

Data interpretation is an important skill that should be developed within undergraduate biology courses. The authors present instruction in which students collaborate to understand authentic data using biological models. Research in this classroom utilized real-time student dialogues to reveal students’ data-interpretation strategies.

Generative mechanistic explanation building in undergraduate molecular and cellular biology

ABSTRACT When conducting scientific research, experts in molecular and cellular biology (MCB) use specific reasoning strategies to construct mechanistic explanations for the underlying causal features of molecular phenomena. We explored how undergraduate students applied this scientific practice in MCB. Drawing from studies of explanation building among scientists, we created and applied a theoretical framework to explore the strategies students use to construct explanations for ‘novel’ biological phenomena. Specifically, we explored how students navigated the multi-level nature of complex biological systems using generative mechanistic reasoning. Interviews were conducted with introductory and upper-division biology students at a large public university in the United States. Results of qualitative coding revealed key features of students’ explanation building. Students used modular thinking to consider the functional subdivisions of the system, which they ‘filled in’ to varying degrees with mechanistic elements. They also hypothesised the involvement of mechanistic entities and instantiated abstract schema to adapt their explanations to unfamiliar biological contexts. Finally, we explored the flexible thinking that students used to hypothesise the impact of mutations on multi-leveled biological systems. Results revealed a number of ways that students drew mechanistic connections between molecules, functional modules (sets of molecules with an emergent function), cells, tissues, organisms and populations.