Grappling With Graphs: New Tools For Improving Graphing Practices of Undergraduate Biology Students

This project aims to serve the national interest by helping educators understand how students learn to accurately make and interpret graphs. All STEM disciplines use graphs to display, interpret, and analyze data. With today’s data analysis and visualization tools, graphing skills are even more crucial as the public gains greater access to databases and dissemination platforms that can widely share both accurate and flawed graphs.

Graphing is particularly difficult in biology, where a wide range of topics leads to many different graphic contexts and where the data tend to be noisy. Currently, educators do not understand the various paths students take in learning to graph biological data or how those paths may differ based on a student’s background. Also not yet understood are the types of instructional interventions that could help students develop graphing expertise.

This project will generate information to answer each of these questions. Specifically, the project will adapt, develop, and refine instructional tools for teaching graphing in a biology context. The project will involve instructors from diverse institutions that have introductory biology courses that enroll large numbers of students from different demographic backgrounds.

Using a graph construction tool called GraphSmarts, the researchers can examine student performance on different graphing tasks to reveal strategies students use to improve their graphing-related abilities.

This project builds upon and expands on previous work examining the graphing practices of undergraduate students using a lobster-kelp scenario in the GraphSmarts tool. The project will develop four new scenarios for introductory biology graphing assessments. These scenarios will focus on topics in physiology, cell biology, and ecology.

Instructors from different institutional types across the United States will participate in a Faculty Mentoring Network to design new assessments that share context-independent attributes with the original lobster-kelp scenario. Using backward design strategies, the instructors will develop activities to teach the new scenarios in their introductory biology courses.

Then, using the GraphSmarts tool, data on student performance will be collected to measure student learning and to validate the new graphing assessments. As students explore the new scenarios, the project will gather qualitative and quantitative data including student graphs and answers to questions. The information gathered from the newly designed assessments will provide educators with a more nuanced understanding of student graphing competencies.

The results will help educators across STEM fields understand barriers that students face in understanding graphing, as well as potential solutions to those barriers. The project will produce open-access materials that will be shared on the high used QUBE network. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students.

This is a Level III project in the Engaged Student Learning track, through which the IUSE program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.