The System aims to reflect several decision-making factors and criteria to build a conceptually complete model comprised of fundamental engineering knowledge as well as "know-how" from general principles, generic knowledge, specific knowledge and case based reasoning.
To fully understand many concepts in biology, students must be able to use principle-based reasoning to move across scales.
Such knowledge provides insight into additional instructional interventions that can help students progress in their development of principle-based reasoning.
Our results clearly reveal that targeted active-learning activities move student reasoning away from informal and mixed reasoning and toward scientific, principle-based reasoning.
Instructor 1-AL's students showed particularly impressive gains for this question and, indeed, 77% of her students demonstrated principle-based reasoning on the posttest.
Students applying principle-based reasoning are able to trace matter and energy across scales without thinking that matter can disappear or become energy in a biological context.
Linking PET and LSET allows students to better use principle-based reasoning, especially in terms of the flow of energy and matter.
For example, students often assumed that they were learning lots of independent factoids ("flash cards" or "equation sheets") rather than a coherent, principle-based reasoning method.
Instructors 1-AL and 2-AL showed substantial gains in the number of students demonstrating principle-based reasoning, whereas Instructor 3-MAL's students remained stable at a mixed reasoning level.
Principle-based reasoning by students would be indicated by explanations that trace carbon through multiple levels of organization and account for mass increases and decreases as a result of carbon transformations.
Therefore, we adopt the term "principle-based reasoning" to mean applying the scientific principles of nature to constrain one's biological explanation (Mohan et al., 2009; Hartley et al., 2011).
