While many college and university faculty understand the importance of evidence-based instruction, opportunities to obtain the training required to write clear and incisive assessment questions that reliably evaluate student understanding of biochemistry and other STEM subjects are limited. The purpose of this project is to train a cadre of approximately thirty instructors from colleges and universities in the Southeastern United States, including the area's many historically black colleges and universities, in best practices for writing effective assessment questions. This will be accomplished through a workshop for molecular life sciences faculty. In the workshop, participants will work with experienced colleagues who will provide training on the principles of effective question writing and, more importantly, work with them on illustrative examples and, finally, on the participants' own questions. An online community will be established to maintain contact between the participants and the facilitators to support the former in applying lessons learned in their classrooms. In turn, it is anticipated that workshop graduates will mentor colleagues interested in improving their own question-writing abilities.
Professional development of educators has the potential to benefit large numbers of students over many years. To provide training in effective question design for the molecular life sciences, this project will organize a one-and-a-half-day workshop for thirty scientists/educators in Summer 2020. The workshop will build on expertise gained by the organizers in designing and scoring the annual undergraduate certification exam offered by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. The workshop will begin with an introduction to writing effective questions and corresponding rubrics, followed by hands-on practice in revising questions and ultimately creating new questions. A keynote speaker will discuss best practices in assessment. The workshop will conclude with reflections on the question-writing process and sustaining a community of question writers. Held in the Atlanta area, the workshop will be advertised to diverse undergraduate institutions, including minority-serving colleges and universities. The workshop will be regional in scope and will have the dual goals of equipping educators to construct clear questions targeted to specific learning objectives and laying the foundation for an inclusive, national community that connects educators interested in effective question design. This project is being jointly funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences, Division of Biological Infrastructure, and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education as part of their efforts to address the challenges posed in "Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action" (http://visionandchange/finalreport).
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
