Molecular, Cellular, and Devleopmental Biology
Assessment tools:
We are developing pre/post assessments for use in Introduction to Molecular and Cell Biology and Genetics. These assessments cover key learning goals for these courses.The assessments are used to identify common student conceptual problems at the beginning of a course, and then we administer the assessment tool again at the end of the semester to determine if students are correcting or maintaining these misunderstandings.
What makes our assessment tools different from other multiple choice tests?
1. The questions cover learning goals that have been deemed important to these courses.
The learning goals:
- were agreed upon by multiple faculty members who teach these courses at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
- are being used by faculty members at other institutions as a model to write or modify learning goals for their own courses.
2. The incorrect answers to the questions are designed to be attractive to students who do not fully understand concepts.
Incorrect answers were designed on the basis of:
- “think-aloud” student interviews with students who received A’s-D’s in previous genetics courses.
- observations of small student study groups working together on genetic homework assignments.
- categorizing responses to open-ended genetics questions.
- asking faculty members to submit student misunderstandings that they have encountered.
3. Biology jargon is used minimally in this assessment, so that students are tested on concepts and are not hindered by a lack of vocabulary.
4. The questions have been validated by multiple faculty members, and through interviews with students (n=22 for Genetics, n=15 for Intro).
We are interested in working with instructors at multiple institutions to verify that our assessment tools are widely useful and reliable instruments. For more information, contact Michelle.K.Smith@colorado.edu, Jia.Shi@colorado.edu, or Jennifer.Knight@colorado.edu
