Decision Making in the Sciences: Understanding Heuristic Use by Students in Problem Solving

The purpose of this study was to examine the use of heuristics by students and gain insight into the thought process behind their problem-solving skills. The study used an adaptive narrative as the information delivery medium. An adaptive narrative was chosen because it could be designed to simulate decision making processes encountered in real world situations. Students enrolled in an introductory biology major class were chosen for the study because their fields of interest all require complex problem solving and decision-making skills. It was of interest to investigate what decisions were made when heuristics were given and how that may influence their rationale in the decision-making process. The results of this study indicate that: heuristics can enable students to make correct decisions when the heuristics are based on already familiar concepts; although students self-reported low cognitive load challenges in the NASA TLX, most of the explanations were deemed poor when graded by rubrics; students had difficulty transferring information learned in the narrative and synthesizing a complete and complex explanation past three data points. This study provides evidence that greater practice in the transfer of information to novel settings is important in education in order for students to become proficient in complex decision-making

The Utility of Storytelling Strategies in the Biology Classroom

Conveying scientific information with high intrinsic cognitive load to students is a challenge. Often, students do not have the existing schema to incorporate the information in a comprehensive manner. One method that has shown promise is storytelling. Storytelling has been successfully used to convey public health information to non-experts. Therefore, it was of interest to determine whether storytelling could be used in the classroom to present information with high intrinsic load to students in a meaningful manner. This study used a post-test only quasi-experimental study design to explore the utility of storytelling as an instructional strategy in anatomy and physiology classes at a community college. Students in the treatment group received instruction that used storytelling to present examples of application. Both control and experimental groups were assessed through the use of a proximal formative quiz, distal multiple-choice questions, and a novel critical thinking exercise administered after the instruction. Results suggest that storytelling was as effective as the instructional methods delivered to the control group. These findings suggest that storytelling may be used as a means to convey complex scientific information in the classroom