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The concept of structure and function is a fundamental example of a crosscutting concept found in the educational reform documents in multiple STEM disciplines. However, the terms structure and function are words used in everyday language, and their use in various disciplines may be a source of lexical ambiguity for students. Discipline-specific professional societies often define pathways of research dissemination as well as the educational expectations for students pursuing a career path related to their discipline. We investigated 16 professional societies ' educational expectations related to structure and function, revealing the presence of multiple discipline-specific disambiguations. As a conservative estimate, the professional societies studied cover the collective interests of at least half of a million practitioners of these disciplines and represent the areas of biology, microbiology, biochemistry and molecular biology, ecology, botany, physiology, chemistry, mathematics, statistics, engineering, and physics. The nature of this crosscutting concept and its discipline-specific uses are a potential learning challenge for students. This work provides an overview of the use of structure and function in multiple STEM disciplines from which instructors can contextualize their teaching.
Instructors across multiple disciplines use the phrase structure and function in undergraduate courses from introductory to advanced levels. This phrase has an extensive history in science at multiple scales and contexts. Historically, it has been used in anatomy and physiology for investigations of the human body (Allchin, 1903; Ophüls, 1907) and what became evolutionary biology, exemplified by Darwin (1859). Searching this phrase reveals over 40,000 entries on Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics) in fields such as mathematics, cancer biology, proteins, cell biology, developmental biology, cardiovascular research, physiology, and biochemistry.
Similar to other key concepts, instructors have an expert-level understanding of the concept of structure and function within their disciplines, and perhaps even among disciplines, developed over many years. As novices, however, students encounter these concepts in a number of different contexts, inside and outside of the classroom. This represents lexical ambiguity, when words that are commonly used in everyday language are applied differently within a specific domain (Barwell, 2005; Kaplan, Fisher, & Rogness, 2009; Lemke, 1990), and may impose a learning barrier. The structure-function concept is encountered throughout a science curriculum, starting in kindergarten (Anderson, Ellis, & Jones, 2014) and is foundational within individual disciplines...