How Students Communicate Knowledge: Written Versus Drawn Responses to Formative Assessment Questions in an Introductory Undergraduate Marine Science Course

Undergraduate science education suffers from a lack of concrete instructional strategies that address real-world postgraduate skills such as visual literacy and science communication. Research within marine science education especially lags behind other, more well-researched fields such as physics or mathematics education, both of which have extensive literature addressing specific instructional strategies that instructors can implement in the classroom. Undergraduate marine science programs overlap with content areas from chemistry, physics, and biology, and provide a rich opportunity for examining how to include more authentic educational experiences in an undergraduate classroom. However, the types of assessments that are typically employed tend to encourage practices such as rote memorization and fact-recall, as assessed by lengthy multiple-choice quizzes and exams. Such assessments have come under scrutiny as professionals and educators alike call for undergraduate instruction to more closely align with actual scientific practice. This study assessed a drawing-to-learn strategy in a marine science classroom to determine if opportunities for students to utilize diagramming and drawing during formative assessments translated into greater depth of information and understanding obtained from their responses. Three different years of student cohorts enrolled in an introductory marine science course at a public university in the Northeastern United States that focused on comparative anatomy and evolution of marine phyla were given formative assessment “notecard questions” throughout the semester-long course from 2017 – 2019. A prompt regarding the close linkages between circulatory and respiratory systems – which exemplified core concepts from guiding instructional documents, as well as addressed specific course goals – was examined in detail, with responses from 2017 and 2018 comprising of traditional written answers, whereas 2019 responses were drawn. Notecards were coded for a variety of holistic and specific parameters to determine the detail of response, whether alternative conceptions were present, and expertise of response, comparing written responses to drawn. Results indicated that drawn responses tended to capture more core ideas (“Key Concepts”) out of three identified and greater depth of detail than written alone. In particular, drawn responses captured specific structures such as the heart (58.2% of responses) and lungs/gills (84.8% of responses) as compared to only 7.3% (χ2 = 73.08, df = 1, p \u3c 0.001) and 43.8% (χ2= 38.26, df = 1, p \u3c 0.001) of written responses, respectively. Certain Key Concepts also seemed to be more easily depicted in drawn form than written, such as the idea of circulatory – respiratory integration. Interestingly, although both response categories had alternative conceptions present, certain alternative conception codes that were more frequent in drawn responses required a higher threshold of knowledge for students to demonstrate before such a code could be invoked. Taken together, the results from this study reveal that strategically incorporating drawing- to-learn opportunities in the undergraduate marine science classroom can provide instructors with more insight into student knowledge than writing alone. Future research can build upon the approaches taken in this study to implement more scaffolded approaches to drawing and diagramming in order to meet the challenges of providing authentic scientific learning opportunities

ANALOG SIGNAL PROCESSING SOLUTIONS AND DESIGN OF MEMRISTOR-CMOS ANALOG CO-PROCESSOR FOR ACCELERATION OF HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING APPLICATIONS

Emerging applications in the field of machine vision, deep learning and scientific simulation require high computational speed and are run on platforms that are size, weight and power constrained. With the transistor scaling coming to an end, existing digital hardware architectures will not be able to meet these ever-increasing demands. Analog computation with its rich set of primitives and inherent parallel architecture can be faster, more efficient and compact for some of these applications. The major contribution of this work is to show that analog processing can be a viable solution to this problem. This is demonstrated in the three parts of the dissertation. In the first part of the dissertation, we demonstrate that analog processing can be used to solve the problem of stereo correspondence. Novel modifications to the algorithms are proposed which improves the computational speed and makes them efficiently implementable in analog hardware. The analog domain implementation provides further speedup in computation and has lower power consumption than a digital implementation. In the second part of the dissertation, a prototype of an analog processor was developed using commercially available off-the-shelf components. The focus was on providing experimental results that demonstrate functionality and to show that the performance of the prototype for low-level and mid-level image processing tasks is equivalent to a digital implementation. To demonstrate improvement in speed and power consumption, an integrated circuit design of the analog processor was proposed, and it was shown that such an analog processor would be faster than state-of-the-art digital and other analog processors. In the third part of the dissertation, a memristor-CMOS analog co-processor that can perform floating point vector matrix multiplication (VMM) is proposed. VMM computation underlies some of the major applications. To demonstrate the working of the analog co-processor at a system level, a new tool called PSpice Systems Option is used. It is shown that the analog co-processor has a superior performance when compared to the projected performances of digital and analog processors. Using the new tool, various application simulations for image processing and solution to partial differential equations are performed on the co-processor model

Recursive Behavior Recording: Complex Motor Stereotypies and Anatomical Behavior Descriptions

A novel anatomical behavioral descriptive taxonomy improves motion capture in complex motor stereotypies (CMS) by indexing precise time data without degradation in the complexity of whole body movement in CMS. The absence of etiological explanation of complex motor stereotypies warrants the aggregation of a core CMS dataset to compare regulation of repetitive behaviors in the time domain. A set of visual formalisms trap configurations of behavioral markers (lateralized movements) for behavioral phenotype discovery as paired transitions (from, to) and asymmetries within repetitive restrictive behaviors. This translational project integrates NIH MeSH (medical subject headings) taxonomy with direct biological interface (wearable sensors and nanoscience in vitro assays) to design the architecture for exploratory diagnostic instruments. Motion capture technology when calibrated to multi-resolution indexing system (MeSH based) quantifies potential diagnostic criteria for comparing severity of CMS within behavioral plasticity and switching (sustained repetition or cyclic repetition) time-signatures. Diagnostic instruments sensitive to high behavioral resolution promote measurement to maximize behavioral activity while minimizing biological uncertainty. A novel protocol advances CMS research through instruments with recursive design