Students' Interdisciplinary Reasoning about "High-Energy Bonds" and ATP

TL;DR

This study explores how undergraduate biology majors in an introductory physics course understand ATP and chemical bonds across disciplines, revealing challenges in integrating biological and physical perspectives on energy and bonds.

Contribution

It provides qualitative insights into students' interdisciplinary reasoning about ATP and bonds, highlighting the influence of disciplinary boundaries on their understanding.

Findings

Students experience contradictions in reasoning about ATP and bonds.

Disciplinary perceptions influence how students justify their reasoning.

Interdisciplinary coherence can be improved by addressing disciplinary boundaries.

Abstract

Students' sometimes contradictory ideas about ATP (adenosine triphosphate) and the nature of chemical bonds have been studied in the biology and chemistry education literatures, but these topics are rarely part of the introductory physics curriculum. We present qualitative data from an introductory physics course for undergraduate biology majors that seeks to build greater interdisciplinary coherence and therefore includes these topics. In these data, students grapple with the apparent contradiction between the energy released when the phosphate bond in ATP is broken and the idea that an energy input is required to break a bond. We see that students' perceptions of how each scientific discipline bounds the system of interest can influence how they justify their reasoning about a topic that crosses disciplines. This has consequences for a vision of interdisciplinary education that respects disciplinary perspectives while bringing them into interaction in ways that demonstrate consistency amongst the perspectives.