Structure and Function Relationships in the Educational Expectations of Professional Societies Across the STEM Disciplines

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.