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Investigating How Students Communicate Tree-Thinking, Carrie Jo Boyce

Dissertations

Learning is often an active endeavor that requires students work at building conceptual understandings of complex topics. Personal experiences, ideas, and communication all play large roles in developing knowledge of and understanding complex topics. Sometimes these experiences can promote formation of scientifically inaccurate or incomplete ideas. Representations are tools used to help individuals understand complex topics. In biology, one way that educators help people understand evolutionary histories of organisms is by using representations called phylogenetic trees. In order to understand phylogenetics trees, individuals need to understand the conventions associated with phylogenies.

My dissertation, supported by the Tree-Thinking Representational Competence and …