Luanna B. Prevost

What Are They Thinking? Automated Analysis of Student Writing about Acid–Base Chemistry in Introductory Biology

Students’ writing can provide better insight into their thinking than can multiple-choice questions. However, resource constraints often prevent faculty from using writing assessments in large undergraduate science courses. We investigated the use of computer software to analyze student writing and to uncover student ideas about chemistry in an introductory biology course. Students were asked to predict acid–base behavior of biological functional groups and to explain their answers. Student explanations were rated by two independent raters. Responses were also analyzed using SPSS Text Analysis for Surveys and a custom library of science-related terms and lexical categories relevant to the assessment item. These analyses revealed conceptual connections made by students, student difficulties explaining these topics, and the heterogeneity of student ideas. We validated the lexical analysis by correlating student interviews with the lexical analysis. We used discriminant analysis to create classification functions that identified seven key lexical categories that predict expert scoring (interrater reliability with experts = 0.899). This study suggests that computerized lexical analysis may be useful for automatically categorizing large numbers of student open-ended responses. Lexical analysis provides instructors unique insights into student thinking and a whole-class perspective that are difficult to obtain from multiple-choice questions or reading individual responses.

Examining the Impact of Question Surface Features on Students’ Answers to Constructed-Response Questions on Photosynthesis

One challenge in science education assessment is that students often focus on question surface features rather than the underlying scientific principles. The authors investigated how student responses to photosynthesis constructed-response questions vary based on two surface features of a question and found no significant difference in the content of responses.

Using Student Writing and Lexical Analysis to Reveal Student Thinking about the Role of Stop Codons in the Central Dogma

Computerized lexical analysis paired with human scoring was used to explore student ideas about the effect of a stop codon mutation on replication, transcription, and translation. It was found that student ideas about one process can affect their understanding of subsequent and previous processes, leading to mixed conceptual models of the central dogma.

What Motivates Biology Instructors to Engage and Persist in Teaching Professional Development

This qualitative study uses expectancy-value theory to explore the motivation for college biology instructors to participate and persist in teaching professional development for 2.5 years.

Step by Step: Biology Undergraduates’ Problem-Solving Procedures during Multiple-Choice Assessment

Findings from a mixed-methods investigation of undergraduate biology problem solving are reported. Students used a variety of problem-solving procedures that are domain general and domain specific. This study provides a model for research on alternative problem types and can be applied immediately in the biology classroom.

A Faculty Professional Development Model That Improves Student Learning, Encourages Active-Learning Instructional Practices, and Works for Faculty at Multiple Institutions.

Helping faculty develop high-quality instruction that positively affects student learning can be complicated by time limitations, a lack of resources, and inexperience using student data to make iterative improvements. We describe a community of 16 faculty from five institutions who overcame these challenges and collaboratively designed, taught, iteratively revised, and published an instructional unit about the potential effect of mutations on DNA replication, transcription, and translation. The unit was taught to more than 2000 students in 18 courses, and student performance improved from preassessment to postassessment in every classroom. This increase occurred even though faculty varied in their instructional practices when they were teaching identical materials. We present information on how this faculty group was organized and facilitated, how members used student data to positively affect learning, and how they increased their use of active-learning instructional practices in the classroom as a result of participation. We also interviewed faculty to learn more about the most useful components of the process. We suggest that this professional development model can be used for geographically separated faculty who are interested in working together on a known conceptual difficulty to improve student learning and explore active-learning instructional practices.