Browsing by Author "Terrell, Cassidy"
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Item Assessing Experts Representational Schema of Protein Structure with Respect to the Vertical Translational Visual Literacy Skill(2021-12) Hensch, Brandy, M; Erickson, Amanda; Lopez, Abner; Bobick, Natalie; Fondie, Cole; Lawrence, Andrea; Prat-Resina, Xavier; Terrell, CassidyItem Do students at UMR differ in their development of horizontal translational literacy skills for the oxygen binding concept across years and/or by sex?(2022-05-03) Hensch, Brandy; Fondie, Cole; Terrell, Cassidy; Bobick, Natalie; Erickson, Amanda; Lopez, Abner Aguirre; Lawrence, Andrea; Prat-Resina, XavierFor many undergraduate students and experts, biology, chemistry, and biochemistry courses are difficult because they involve conceptual understanding of ideas that require assimilation of new knowledge with pre-existing knowledge from prior courses. Misconceptions increase cognitive load and interrupt the mental framework, making it difficult for individuals to learn and master course material. Adding to the complexity of these disciplines, individuals are presented with a variety of representations of abstraction which adds to the already high cognitive load of these courses (Schönborn et. al 2002; Offerdahl et. al, 2017). Intentional development of individuals' visual literacy skills has the potential to increase conceptual understanding while also decreasing cognitive load. Although research suggests that developing learners’ mental models can help overcome misconceptions, little to no evidence exists in the chemistry and biochemistry education literature on student and experts structural knowledge related to visual literacy skills, specifically with horizontal translational visual literacy skills for oxygen binding (Chi, 2008; Gilbert & Boulter, 1998; Cranford et. al, 2014, Schönborn and Anderson, 2010). A study was conducted in 2021 in which students and experts were administered four surveys of (bio)chemical models and were asked to scale their similarities from 0-9. This research leads the way for the development of novel targeted learning assessments that address misconceptions and integrate active learning into the undergraduate biochemistry curricula to increase undergraduate student understanding of different chemical and biochemical processes.Item The Organization of Learning: How Experts and Undergraduate Students Connect Vertically Translated Protein Structure Topics(2021-10-18) Terrell, Cassidy; Lawrence, Andrea E.Biochemistry as a discipline can be incredibly difficult to understand as it heavily relies on visual representations of systems of data to portray information, and these representations can be complex and difficult to understand. The cognitive load theory suggests that students use frameworks formed with pre-existing knowledge to process new knowledge, but this process can be easily disturbed by the presence of extraneous cognitive load. Improving students’ visual literacy skills can lessen their cognitive load as it becomes easier to decode and interpret external representations. There is little existing research that addresses how students interpret and store biochemical information in their memory. Studies performed with undergraduate chemistry students tested students’ knowledge of topics by asking them to rank the relatedness of different chemistry-related words/phrases. Our study tests students’ understanding of biochemistry topics by asking them to rank the relatedness of different visual representations instead of words/phrases. The technique used in this study observes how participants organize sets of biochemistry topics by numerically determining the relatedness of two images that are representative of important concepts that are involved in protein structure. Important variables that will be analyzed are the correlation, path length correlation (PLC), and network similarity (NS), all of which will be derived via Pathfinder. Correlation is the consistency of each participant’s data set, PLC and NS both measure the similarities of each participant’s network with the average expert network. The findings of this study can be useful in understanding how students at different levels throughout their academic career organize biochemistry topics within their memory. This will be helpful for structuring classes for optimal learning and retention of information. The findings from this stage of data collection indicate that there is a difference between the neural networks of expert participants and student participants.