Undergraduate biology education reform aims to engage students in scientific practices such as experimental design, experimentation, and data analysis and communication. Graphs are ubiquitous in the biological sciences, and creating effective graphical representations involves quantitative and disciplinary concepts and skills. Past studies…

Undergraduate students are increasingly being used to support course transformations that incorporate research-based instructional strategies. While such students are typically selected based on strong content knowledge and possible interest in teaching, they often do not have previous pedagogical training. The current training models make use of…

To succeed within scientific disciplines, using representations, including those based on words, graphs, equations, and diagrams, is important. Research indicates that the use of discipline specific representations (sometimes referred to as expert generated representations), as well as multi-representational use, is critical for problem solving…

Recent studies on a computationally hard visual optimization problem, the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP), indicate that humans are capable of finding close to optimal solutions in near-linear time. The current study is a preliminary step in investigating human performance on another hard problem, the Minimum Vertex Cover Problem, in which…

We present a new method for analyzing a student's learning over time for a specific skill: analysis of the graph of the student's moment-by-moment learning over time. Moment-by-moment learning is calculated using a data-mined model that assesses the probability that a student learned a skill or concept at a specific time during learning (Baker,…