Meeting Abstract
The Vision and Change report (AAAS, 2011) recommends that biology educators structure undergraduate teaching around five core concepts to support student development of a cognitive framework for learning biology. However, validated instruments to assess student conceptual understanding of the proposed core concepts do not exist. Using a framework of conceptual elements that transcend biological scale for each core concept, we developed and validated a comprehensive assessment instrument, the five core concept instrument (5CCI). The 5CCI assesses students’ ability to generate, in writing, their own understanding of a core concept, identify concepts within biological phenomena, and make connections between concepts. To objectively score the student-generated responses, we developed an associated rubric and a novel component scoring system that discriminates a student’s ability to apply and identify each core concept addressed in the narrative from their ability to make connections between core concepts. We field-tested the 5CCI with students at the beginning of their Introductory Biology I course and at the end of their Introductory Biology II course (N = 358) to measure whether their performance was affected following two semesters of general biology. Students improved their ability to answer true/false statements accurately and identify core concepts; however, some concepts, like Pathways and transformations of energy and matter, remained challenging for students even after completing two semesters of biology. Our results demonstrate the utility of the 5CCI as a validated instrument with the unique feature of component scoring to allow bioscience educators to assess nuanced understanding of the Vision and Change core concepts across biological phenomena.
