This project addresses two problems, first identified in the 1980s, that persist today. First, students have many misconceptions that are at odds with scientific ideas and that are tenacious, persistent, and resistant to change. Second, with the advent of large lecture classes and multiple-choice testing, many college students can earn good grades simply by superficial memorization that results in no long-term retention or modification of underlying misconceptions. Conceptual assessments in biology (CABs) are designed to examine the ways students are reasoning and applying scientific principles to solve scientific problems. This project will support planning and initial development of a network focused on the use of conceptual assessments to help biology faculty transform instruction to promote students' meaningful understanding and problem-solving abilities. Goals of the network will be to strengthen the community of CAB developers and create a central repository on the web to serve the needs of both CAB developers and faculty who use CABs.
Broader impacts of the network will include broad dissemination of CAB materials and training of faculty in the development and use of CABs.
This project is supported jointly by the Biological Sciences Directorate and the Division of Undergraduate Education.
Project Outcomes: Conceptual Assessments in Biology - Tools for Learning The goal of this project was to inform curriculum and instruction in order to transform biology education through the use of Conceptual Assessments in Biology (CABs). Conceptual assessments were first developed and effectively used by physicists to implement reform in introductory physics teaching (e.g., Force Concept Inventory), though their use in biology education has lagged behind. This project served to catalyze collaborations of CAB developers and users, and facilitate wide-spread dissemination and use of CABs to improve biology education. Biology curricula are far more varied than in physics, presenting unique challenges. So instead of one comprehensive instrument biologists are developing many conceptual assessments. Typically each CAB focuses on "Big" conceptual areas in biology, like natural selection, and can be used to assess both in-class learning and curricular program effectiveness. Most CABs use commonsense ideas (persistent misconceptions shared by many students) as distracters. There are no fact-recall questions in CABs. Each item engages students in thinking at higher cognitive levels, so items can be used to promote conceptual understanding in various learning settings, where both correct and incorrect choices provide fodder for discussion. Items from CABs can promote engagement and active learning in biology courses of all sizes, and entire CABs can assess students’ understanding in subsections of courses, entire courses, and across programs. CAB development involves repeated cycles of thoughtful design, administration to students, refinement, and validation, yet a diversity of conceptual assessments in biology (over 20) are now published by different research groups. Unfortunately, while developers had met twice before this project to discuss fundamental design issues and use of CABs, little collaboration had resulted and many questions remained unanswered about their development, use, and broad dissemination. This Tools for Learning project assembled working groups of developers and users, online and at a national meeting (CAB III), to formulate strategies and design a website (which we proposed to develop later). The goals were to: catalogue available CABs and solicit new ones; introduce CABs into biology instruction and course/curriculum design; create models for use of CABs in teaching, research, and programmatic assessment; and design a CAB Registry to distribute CABs and document outcomes obtained –in preparation for submitting a full RCN UBE proposal (which was submitted and funded). The CAB III Meeting was held in San Diego, CA, May 2010. Twenty-eight participants from 17 institutions (15 US universities, plus one Australian and one South African university) attended. This intense and collegial meeting fostered past and new collaborations among CAB developers, and collaborative manuscripts are in preparation. To identify all available CABs, we solicited information from participants about CABs they knew about and continued to search the literature. From this we compiled and annotated the only listing of CABs known to date, which is now widely used. Collecting and disseminating information about how to use CABs to enhance biology education was a major goal of this project. CAB III participants discussed how to introduce CABs into biology instruction and course/curriculum design and examined examples of using CABs in teaching, research, and programmatic assessment. Presentations that promoted rich discussion and continued collaboration were by Trevor Anderson (University of KwaZulu-Natal) "A model that guides the design of assessment tasks that probe conceptual understanding"; Jenny Knight (UC Boulder) "Enhancing collaborative learning"; Tony Wright, et al. (University of Queensland) "Faculty reactions to conceptual inventories"; and Katherine McAdams (University of Maryland). Fortuitously, Teri Reed-Rhoads (Purdue) described the new "ciHUB" (concept inventory HUB; ciHUB.org).) as a virtual community for Concept Inventory developers, researchers, and users supported through research, faculty development, and infrastructure development - also funded by the NSF. The Purdue ciHUB was being populated with assessments of content areas relevant to engineering, like mathematics and engineering, and they were soliciting more science assessments to add. Thus as a result of this project, researchers began to forge a collaboration with researchers building the sophisticated ciHUB site, and plans to attain the original goal of deploying conceptual assessments in Biology (CABs) online were greatly accelerated. After the CAB III meeting, a group of participants went to Purdue and also met via conference call with ciHUB developers to explore the possibilities of using that site, rather than developing a novel one for CABs, as was originally anticipated. This resource for distributing and using CABs and documenting outcomes obtained with them is now being developed on the nascent BioHUB sector of the ciHUB.org housed and managed by faculty at Purdue University. By bringing together CAB developers and science faculty from across disciplines to foster dissemination and use of CABs, this Incubator project and a the subsequent RCN-UBE award aim to profoundly influence the ways in which biology is taught nationwide, helping to achieve the desired active processing, meaningful thinking, and problem-solving capacities we hope all our students will attain.
