This project is supporting a workshop to convene biology education researchers to plan out the development and validation of a Biology Competencies Assessment Series (BCAS). The BCAS will consist of several multiple-choice and short-answer questions validated by students and designed to evaluate student progress on learning biology concepts and achieving the competencies recommended in "Vision and Change: A Call to Action." In particular, the workshop is bringing together Principal Investigators of both new and established TUES projects related to developing assessment tools to address effectiveness of instruction.
Intellectual merit: The project provides the opportunity for experts in biology educational research to work towards the development of assessments that track the progress of students at multiple points in their undergraduate careers. The opportunity to plan also allows participants to share (and not replicate) efforts to standardize the protocols for validating the questions important to the biology community.
Broader impacts: The project plans a consensus set of tools to help the larger biology community assess how well students are mastering the concepts and competencies outlined in national initiatives. From an educational perspective, this workshop provides promising advances to standard measurement for student learning that allows biology departments across the country to use data-driven processes to align their teaching practices and curricula with learning goals prescribed in several national reports including "Vision and Change."
This project is being funded by the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education as part of its efforts toward supporting the goals and objectives of "Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education."
Over the past decade, there has been a national effort to transform undergraduate biology education so that we teach biology in a way that reflects how we practice biology. More recently, the NSF and AAAS sponsored a series of conversations with over 500 stakeholders in biology education that resulted in a report entitled Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action. Vision and Change articulated a set of core concepts for biological literacy and discipline-specific core competencies, while incorporating the current model of how students learn. Although this report marks a notable accomplishment, to date no validated assessments exist to measure whether students are making progress toward these objectives as they advance through the undergraduate curriculum. To begin to develop an assessment to meet these needs, TUES-funded scholars from multiple institutions met to plan the development of a series of biology assessments aligned with the core concepts and competencies outlined in Vision and Change. We generated a plan to develop, validate, and field-test a collection of biology assessments called Bio-MAPS (for Biology-Measuring Achievement and Progression in Science). In total, we plan to develop four Bio-MAPS assessments: an assessment for each of three focal areas—molecular and cellular biology, physiology and neuroscience, and ecology and evolution—and a comprehensive assessment including questions from each of the three individual assessments. The Bio-MAPS assessments will be administered at multiple points in the biology curriculum to monitor student progress and enable targeted curricular reform. Following our CRP-funded planning workshop, we wrote eight assessment questions, response validated these questions by interviewing 16 introductory and 16 advanced students from multiple institutions, and piloted these questions to 1700 students at three different Research I (R1) universities and five different community colleges. This pilot project helped inform our question development process, galvanized our group communication processes, and provided important preliminary data that served as the basis for a TUES II grant application that we submitted in January 2013. These preliminary results indicate that our collaborative research team is able to efficiently work together to establish a framework for the assessments, design and validate questions, and analyze the effectiveness of questions. If awarded a TUES II grant, we will extend this work to create a complete and effective set of Bio-MAPS assessments. Intellectual Merit: The CRP-funded workshop was the first step towards defining core concepts and competencies from Vision and Change and fostering programmatic assessment in undergraduate biology. The research team will work with biology faculty to develop a framework that outlines expectations for what students should know and be able to do at different collegiate levels and utilize best practices from the field of educational assessment to develop standardized assessments for use in departments nationwide. The Bio-MAPS project thus represents a unique effort to articulate common learning goals and monitor longitudinal student learning in biology. Broader Impacts: Because the Bio-MAPS assessments will be aligned to Vision and Change, they will provide a much-needed resource for departments engaging in curricular reform. Data from the Bio-MAPS assessments will catalyze change by: 1) diagnosing areas in which students continue to struggle despite instruction, 2) allowing two-year community colleges to evaluate how well they are preparing students for transfer to four-year institutions, 3) inspiring and directing faculty and institutional conversations about enacting change at the programmatic level, 4) helping administrators focus limited resources on aspects of the curricula that have the strongest need for revision, and 5) challenging faculty to re-design course curricula to effectively scaffold student learning of difficult concepts. Biology departments can also use Bio-MAPS assessments to demonstrate evidence of student learning for accreditation processes.
