Connecting the Dots: Students’ Mental Organization and Storage of Biochemistry Visual Literacy Skills

Abstract

Undergraduate molecular life science curricula rely on a variety of abstract visual representations to convey information. Intentional development of undergraduate students’ visual literacy skills has the potential to increase conceptual understanding while also decreasing cognitive load. There is little existing research that assesses how students interpret and store biochemical information and representations in their long‐term memory. Moreover, the number of validated instruments for measuring visual literacy is limited. Studies performed with undergraduate chemistry students measured students’ structural knowledge, or schema, of topics by asking them to rank the relatedness of words/phrases. Our study aims to develop a valid assessment tool that measures participants' schema of biochemistry visual literacy skills by asking them to rank the relatedness of biochemical representations instead of words/phrases. We created four surveys to evaluate vertical and horizontal translation visual literacy skills. With the use of Pathfinder, we analyzed the schema of undergraduate students with variable knowledge in biochemistry at four universities against an expert referentnetwork. Preliminary results also assess if pedagogical strategies and course instructional modalities impact student’s schema. The characterization of representational schema held by students and experts could aid the development of curricular materials for optimal learning and retention of information in the molecular life sciences.