Concept-driven teaching and assessment in Invertebrate Zoology

Abstract

An analysis of student writing suggests that new concepts are best learned when the concepts are encountered within the context of solving problems The effectiveness of a new Biology curriculum, which emphasized the understanding of concepts rather than the transfer of information, was evaluated through student writing. The key concept is that the form of an organism is dictated by its evolutionary history and by the organism's adaptation to its environment. When practicals were designed so that students used key concepts to solve problems, students demonstrated their conceptual understanding more clearly. This was manifested in the students' ability to assert a claim and support it with rational argument. Detailed information resulted in practicals reverting to information-gathering exercises, and consequently student writing became purely descriptive. When an assigned task was too structured, students attempted to provide an ideal answer by reverting to rotelearned information. This was manifested in students providing content-based responses. These results suggest that for a concept-driven curriculum to be successful there must be coherence between curricular goals, curricular methods, task design, and assessment practices.