| Field of Study: | Biology Education |
| Title: | Professor |
| Degrees: | PhD. Science Education, The University of Iowa |
| Homepage: | Homepage/Lab Web Site Link |
| Google Scholar: |  Google Scholar |
| Office: | 236 Cleveland Hall |
| Email: | andy.cavagnetto@wsu.edu |
| Phone: | 509-335-6391 |
| Fax: | 509-335-5046 |
| Mailing Address: | School of Biological Sciences Washington State University PO Box 644236 Pullman,WA 99164-4236 |
I am interested in reasoning and construction/critique of ideas as students pose questions, gather data, and negotiate evidence-based claims in biology learning contexts. I study how teachers create these environments and how students engage in them. Over the past few years, this had led me to focus on environmental factors influencing students’ willingness to cooperate, how classroom environments influence engagement in scientific reasoning and productive talk, and the subsequent impact on student outcomes. Currently I serve as a co-principal investigator on an NSF-funded project examining scientific reasoning from primary data in a large-lecture undergraduate biology context (https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1822490&HistoricalAwards=false). The study is examining materials and pedagogical structures (supporting content, reasoning, and norms of interaction) for integrating primary data into large lecture biology. Additionally, my collaborators and I are exploring the relationship between pedagogical structures and productive student-student talk in large-lecture biology and are working to develop profiles of student-student interactions in data interpretation contexts.