Challenges facing interdisciplinary researchers: Findings from a professional development workshop.

Interdisciplinary research is the synergistic combination of two or more disciplines to achieve one research objective. Current research highlights the importance of interdisciplinary research in science education, particularly between educational experts within a particular science discipline (discipline-based education researchers) and those who study human learning in a more general sense (learning scientists). However, this type of interdisciplinary research is not common and little empirical evidence exists that identifies barriers and possible solutions.

Developing the BETTSI: A tree-thinking diagnostic tool to assess individual elements of representational competence.

Phylogenies are a ubiquitous visual representation of core concepts in evolutionary biology and it is important that students develop an ability to read and correctly interpret these diagrams. However, as with any representation of complex disciplinary information, learning to correctly interpret phylogenies can be challenging, requiring that a diversity of educational strategies be deployed. Representational competence is the ability to develop and effectively use abstract representations.