Describing the Development of the Assessment of Biological Reasoning (ABR)

Jennifer Schellinger,Sam Skrob-Martin,Kari Roberts,Sherry A Southerland,Danielle Rhemer,Patrick J Enderle

doi:10.3390/educsci11110669

Jennifer Schellinger, Sam Skrob-Martin + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11110669

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Abstract

Assessments of scientific reasoning that capture the intertwining aspects of conceptual, procedural and epistemic knowledge are often associated with intensive qualitative analyses of student responses to open-ended questions, work products, interviews, discourse and classroom observations. While such analyses provide evaluations of students’ reasoning skills, they are not scalable. The purpose of this study is to develop a three-tiered multiple-choice assessment to measure students’ reasoning about biological phenomena and to understand the affordances and limitations of such an assessment. To validate the assessment and to understand what the assessment measures, qualitative and quantitative data were collected and analyzed, including read-aloud, focus group interviews and analysis of large sample data sets. These data served to validate our three-tiered assessment called the Assessment of Biological Reasoning (ABR) consisting of 10 question sets focused on core biological concepts. Further examination of our data suggests that students’ reasoning is intertwined in such a way that procedural and epistemic knowledge is reliant on and given meaning by conceptual knowledge, an idea that pushes against the conceptualization that the latter forms of knowledge construction are more broadly applicable across disciplines.

Highlights

Enhanced learning in science moves beyond memorization and recitation of fundamental concepts to encompass a much larger collection of sense-making activities that resemble the cognitive, procedural, epistemic and social work of scientists [1,2,3]
Measuring students’ scientific reasoning across a discipline and across dimensions of scientific reasoning through more scalable quantitative approaches remains an ongoing challenge for science education research, something that limits the research that can be conducted. In light of these challenges, this study focuses on the iterative development and validation of a multiple-choice instrument using qualitative and psychometrically sound quantitative approaches aimed at assessing dimensions of students’ scientific reasoning across ten focal topic areas within biology, entitled Assessment of Biological Reasoning
Using the collection of evidence described above, we assert that the preliminary evidence supports the Assessment of Biological Reasoning as a valid assessment instrument for measuring high school students’ reasoning capabilities across several major biological topic areas

Summary

Introduction

Enhanced learning in science moves beyond memorization and recitation of fundamental concepts to encompass a much larger collection of sense-making activities that resemble the cognitive, procedural, epistemic and social work of scientists [1,2,3]. Greater emphasis on engaging students in practices reflecting the investigative, explanatory and evaluative spheres of science require supporting students in understanding the conceptual elements involved and the procedural and epistemic function of such practices [3,7]. Such learning helps students participate in the development of evidence-based arguments, explanations and models, and helps them learn to evaluate the quality of different elements of these products and how the processes involved in developing them connect with each other [8,9]. We define scientific reasoning as the process that encompasses “the skills involved in inquiry, experimentation, evidence evaluation and inference that are done in the service of conceptual change or scientific understanding” [11] (p. 172), a process that brings together conceptual (i.e., content), procedural and epistemic aspects of knowledge [3,12]

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