Anatomy and Physiology Beyond “This Is Interesting:” Assessing Transformative Experiences Through Epistemic Network Analysis

Transformative experiences mark learning that impacts students’ everyday lives and are desired outcomes of education. In our study, we explored the transformative experiences of undergraduate anatomy and physiology (A&P) students through their written reflections about the course topics. Using a mixed methods approach, we qualitatively coded 151 reflections from 31 A&P students for markers of transformative experiences, learning motivation constructs, and facets of their social ecologies. We utilized epistemic network analysis (ENA) to examine the frequency of connections that students made between these constructs. The generated networks revealed that students make the most connections in their writing between their personal experiences, triggered interest in the course content, expansion of perception of course topics in everyday life, and stating that they had learned something in the course. However, not all student writing included evidence of transformative experiences. Additionally, there was variance between the number of connections and the strength of connections in students’ individual networks. This variance may be partially explained by the degree of participation a student completed during the course. Within undergraduate biology contexts, our results suggest instructors wishing to support these experiences as an outcome should structure participation activities to leverage students’ communities and personal experiences. We conclude that ENA can be an advantageous tool in science education research to evaluate student writing for salient connections between different constructs of interest to researchers and practitioners.