Improving Students’ Representational Competence through a Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience

Abstract

Visual representations are integral for communicating abstract science concepts and promoting insights for new scientific discoveries. Students’ representational competence is positively correlated with problem solving in the sciences and subsequent improvements in academic performance. We explored how students’ participation in the authentic practice of science with the use of visual representations would impact representational competence. We further tested a model of representational competence to understand how the use of student-generated representations in a Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) revealed undergraduate thinking about biological content, scientific literacy and the process of science. In this mixed methods study, we found that the applied theoretical framework could be used to effectively describe students’ representational competence. We observed all seven levels of representational competence with annotated genomes. In this chapter, we present rich descriptions of each level, including connections between content and scientific practice revealed by analysis of 147 student-generated representations. Additionally, we found that students’ competencies significantly improved after participation in the CURE. Our framework to examine representational competence can be used as a novel way to reveal changes in scientific thinking and examine the impact of undergraduate research experiences.