🏆 Awarded Best Graduate Talk
How humans influence the Earth, our inherent dependence on it, our relationship to each other, and our connection to all life -- no discipline meaningfully illuminates such concepts as biology does. Biology unveils the substance that serves as the blueprint for our own construction, but also demonstrates how that substance is life's very deepest homology. That is to say, biology can offer explanation at multiple levels: first by establishing patterns and investigating their creative processes, and then by providing proximate and ultimate causes for observed patterns and processes. This dual causality -- the proximate functional 'how' and the ultimate evolutionary 'why' -- is both particular and of particular importance to biological sciences; the 'why' being the stuff that gives the 'how' consequence.
Hundreds of studies illustrate that students maintain tenacious misconceptions regarding the evolutionary principles necessary for recognizing levels of biological explanation. To dissect these misconceptions, I administered a pre-post assignment with open-ended reflective questions to explore (1) how students construct explanations about natural selection and adaptation across several levels of postsecondary study, and (2) the extent to which their explanations change as they continue formal biology instruction. My framework, adapted from Tinbergen's Four Questions, categorizes students' answers based on the level of explanation addressed. Here I discuss preliminary data from one semester and the implications of my findings for both teaching and biology education generally: namely, that students need more than facts and examples to form a robust conceptual framework in biology.
See above references.pdf for slide citations, inspirations, and more reading on various topics.
Slides created in R Studio using the xaringan package. More details on this package are available here.
Most images found here.
- Cherry Blossom (1887–1897) by Ogawa Kazumasa
- Landscape of Kragerø (1912) by Edvard Munch
- Only Yesterday, film by Isao Takahata
- The Valley of the Nervia (1884) by Claude Monet
- Peacock (1925-1936) by Ohara Koson
- Pellucid Medusa or Hyaline Medusa illustration (1789-1813) by George Shaw
- Papilio laertes or Laertes butterfly illustration (1789-1813) by George Shaw
- Pinnated Gorgonia illustration (1789-1813) by George Shaw
- Golden Chaetodon illustration (1789-1813) by George Shaw
- Sakura cherry (1870–1880) by Megata Morikaga
- Red gurnard (Tirgla Lineatus)(1802) by Edward Donovan
- Chinese painting featuring two birds among flowers (ca.1800–1899) from the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs