Learning to Understand the Tree of Life

Tree-thinking is increasingly recognized as a crucial skill in the biological sciences. However, for students, the task is wrought with challenges. Even as representations are meant to facilitate reasoning about difficult concepts such as macroevolution and the phylogenetic relationships among taxa, existing tree diagrams that are so crucial to the biologist‟s profession present many challenges that hinder students‟ understanding. The presenters in this symposium take multiple theoretical and methodological lenses to examine the many-faceted challenges of tree-thinking with representations – from the issues of representation and symbolization, to the cognitive and developmental issues of reasoning, to the implementation of a classroom intervention. Brought together in this symposium, the researchers initiate an ongoing agenda to understand and to design interventions that will support students‟ reasoning with this important representational tool.