Biophysics concept inventory survey: An assessment in biophysical undergraduate education

Abstract

By developing a metric to gauge student understanding, instructors can assess student base knowledge and better understand where to direct or how to instruct students. Here we introduce a Biophysical Conceptual Inventory Survey (BCIS), a 20-question, multiple-choice survey to quantitatively measure student learning regarding biophysical concepts. The BCIS contains five different question types: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, and synthesis. These questions probe the student's ability to apply the knowledge to various situations. We applied the BCIS on 32 undergraduate students over three-year cohorts of ∼10 students. Each cohort participated in a 10-week summer research experience, where each student leads their own interdisciplinary research project. Students take the BCIS twice, once right before the start of the REU (the pre-survey) and then again right at the end of the REU (the post-survey). The score from the pre-survey and post-survey are compared to determine the fraction of the maximum possible gain realized. This gain is compared against various factors of the students and REU situations. The BCIS shows no biases on gender, diversity, class ranking, or home university Carnegie classification. Further, most students showed a net gain with a mean of 0.124, with 75% showing no loss. The positive gain reflects the benefit of active learning with little to no traditional instruction. Thus, the BCIS is a robust, unbiased assessment tool for biophysical undergraduate education.