| dc.contributor.author | Slominski, Tara Nicole | |
| dc.description.abstract | Across the United States, Human Anatomy and Physiology (HA&P) courses typically have some of the highest withdrawal and failure rates on college campuses. These high enrollment course typically serve as gate-keepers for those individuals with aspirations of entering the medical field. In light of the growing national shortage of healthcare professionals, there is a pressing need to improve the state of HA&P education at a national scale. The goal of this dissertation is to understand why undergraduate students struggle to succeed in HA&P courses. I leveraged multiple frameworks from biology education research, physics education research, and cognitive psychology to understand the source of student difficulty in HA&P. I used a mixed-methods approach to unpack how students reason about the complex phenomena covered in HA&P classes. The data presented here suggest student difficulties in HA&P are not the product of a culmination of individual conceptual difficulties. Rather, this work suggests students have difficulty reasoning with the many complex systems that are at the heart of HA&P curriculum. Students appear to frame these complex systems in a manner that activates reasoning strategies that are often in conflict with course goals. The findings from this work advocate for a dynamic view of student cognition that recognizes the implications of context features on student reasoning of complex systems. | en_US |
| dc.publisher | North Dakota State University | en_US |
| dc.rights | NDSU policy 190.6.2 | en_US |
| dc.title | Using a Cross-Cutting Theoretical Framework to Explore Difficulties Learning Human Anatomy and Physiology | en_US |
| dc.type | Dissertation | en_US |
| dc.type | Video | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2021-08-27T15:04:46Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2021-08-27T15:04:46Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2020 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10365/32049 | |
| dc.subject | discipline-based education research | en_US |
| dc.subject | framing and resources | en_US |
| dc.subject | human anatomy and physiology | en_US |
| dc.subject | STEM education | en_US |
| dc.subject | student difficulties | en_US |
| dc.rights.uri | https://www.ndsu.edu/fileadmin/policy/190.pdf | en_US |
| ndsu.degree | Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) | en_US |
| ndsu.college | Science and Mathematics | en_US |
| ndsu.department | Biological Sciences | en_US |
| ndsu.program | Biological Sciences | en_US |
| ndsu.program | STEM Education | en_US |
| ndsu.advisor | Momsen, Jennifer | |
