Adapting Undergraduate Biology to Include Science Practices by Teaching Students to Generate Scientific Explanations

ABSTRACT

Generating scientific explanations is a fundamental science practice in biology, yet pedagogical efforts to make this practice explicit and devote time for students to perform this practice are not common in gateway science courses. We developed a quarter-long scientific literature annotation project to teach students how to produce scientific explanations in an adapted version of an introductory biology course. We assessed student proficiency in this practice before and after project completion using a previously validated instrument and a rubric adapted to focus on practice distinct from content. Students were given a final exam question shared with a parallel course. The parallel course was taught by the same instructor during the same quarter with similar demographic composition but without the adapted curriculum. Data revealed pre/post improvements in student performance within the adapted course and better performance on a shared final exam question across courses. Results suggest that assessment-driven lesson plans can help instructors engage students in learning science practices. We believe rubrics designed to distinguish practice from content were critical in revealing student achievement and highlighting areas of struggle. We recommend instructors use assessment-driven curriculum to explicitly teach, assess and recognise practices in college classrooms.

KEYWORDS:

• Scientific explanations
• pedagogy
• introductory biology
• science practices
• rubric
• assessment

Acknowledgments

The reported work was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute [#52008112] as part of the UC Santa Cruz Active Learning Initiative and by the Institute for Scientist & Engineer Educators [AST#1743117]. Our human subjects research study met the criteria of exemption as decided by the University of California Santa Cruz Office of Research Compliance Administration (ORCA). We are grateful to Dr. Rafael Palomino, Dr. Nicholas McConnell, and Austin Barnes for their helpful input with rubric modification and redesign. We would like to thank Christine Starr for her assistance with the inter-rater reliability and final exam statistics. We thank Leo Rosen and the UC Santa Cruz Institutional Research, Assessment, & Policy Studies (IRAPS) unit for their support with student demographic data. Finally, we thank the Physical & Biological Sciences Division at UC Santa Cruz and specifically Dean Paul Koch and Assistant Dean Carrie Häber for their support of this project. The assessment and rubric we adapted was published and copyrighted by McNeill & Krajcik 2009.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00219266.2024.2320114

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute [52008112]; National Science Foundation [AST#1743117].