DidMat Seminars with Joseph Dauer

Title

Quantitative Modeling in Biology: exploring how students use math to understanding biology

Speaker

Joseph Dauer

Abstract

As a trained plant ecologist, Joseph Dauer used mathematical modeling to understand how plant populations moved around landscapes. At some point, he began to wonder how university biology students developed their mathematical abilities and specifically how they used modeling to understand complex biological systems. In this seminar Dauer will share research that he has conducted over the past decade on how students construct, interpret, and evaluate different types of models, emphasizing biology students’ cognitive skills in quantitative modeling. His recent work looks at the interaction of cognition with metacognition and socio-emotional aspects of learning to better understand how students seek to make sense of quantitative biology questions.

A few references:

Dauer, Joseph, Heather Bergan-Roller, Gretchen King, McKenzie Kjose, Nicholas J. Galt, and Tomáš Helikar. “Changes in Students’ Mental Models from Computational Modeling of Gene Regulatory Networks.”International Journal of STEM Education 6, no. 1 (2019): 38. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-019-0193-0.

Dauer, Joseph, Robert Mayes, Kent Rittschof, and Bryon Gallant. “Assessing Quantitative Modelling Practices, Metamodelling, and Capability Confidence of Biology Undergraduate Students.” International Journal of Science Education 43, no. 10 (2021): 1685–707. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2021.1928325.

Mayes, Robert, David Owens, Joseph Dauer, and Kent Rittschof. “A Quantitative Reasoning Framework and the Importance of Quantitative Modeling in Biology.” Applied and Computational Mathematics 11, no. 1 (2022): 1. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.acm.20221101.11.

Attend online via Zoom: https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/j/67417556797