Calling for Equity-focused Quantitative Methodology in Discipline-based Education Research: An Introduction to Latent Class Analysis.

Mixture modeling is a latent variable (i.e., a variable that cannot be measured directly) approach to quantitatively represent unobserved subpopulations within an overall population.

The Impact of Context on Students' Framing and Reasoning about Fluid Dynamics.

Contextual features of assessments can influence the ideas students draw from and the ways they assemble knowledge. We used a mixed-methods approach to explore how surface-level item context impacts student reasoning. In study 1, we developed an isomorphic survey to capture student reasoning about fluid dynamics, a crosscutting phenomenon, in two item contexts (blood vessels, water pipes), and administered the survey to students in two different course contexts: human anatomy and physiology (HA&P) and physics.

Using Framing as a Lens to Understand Context Effects on Expert Reasoning.

National calls to transform undergraduate classrooms highlight the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). As biologists, we use principles from chemistry and physics to make sense of the natural world. One might assume that scientists, regardless of discipline, use similar principles, resources, and reasoning to explain crosscutting phenomena.

Physiology is hard: a replication study of students' perceived learning difficulties.

Human Anatomy and Physiology (HAP) has long been recognized as a difficult course. A 2007 study (Michael J. Adv Physiol Educ 31: 34-40, 2007) sought to better understand this difficulty by asking faculty for their perceptions of why students struggle to learn in HAP.

Drawing on student knowledge of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology.

Drawings are an underutilized assessment format in Human Anatomy and Physiology (HA&P), despite their potential to reveal student content understanding and alternative conceptions. This study used student-generated drawings to explore student knowledge in a HA&P course. The drawing tasks in this study focused on chemical synapses between neurons, an abstract concept in HA&P.