Development of an Assessment Tool for Evaluating Undergraduate Student Understanding of Pedigree Analysis

Abstract

Biology education is currently undergoing reform efforts to increase student retention and appreciation within the biological sciences. Both Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education call for the increased use of evidence‐based pedagogical strategies to support learning in biology learning environments. However, integration of evidence‐based instructional strategies relies on biology instructors' knowledge of student pre‐conceptions and misconceptions. Genetics represents a critical area of biology education that presents many problems for student learning due to its abstract nature, the need to think through different spatial scales, and heavy reliance upon technical language. Pedigree analysis represents a convergence of topics in genetics and, therefore, has the potential to identify multiple student learning difficulties. Pedigree analysis requires an understanding of modes of inheritance, which requires a knowledge of the nature of both dominance and recessiveness of traits, as well as understanding of the connections between genotype and phenotype and use of the symbolic scale. This project sought to gain an understanding of students' misconceptions of pedigrees in order to promote the development of an assessment tool for students' misconceptions. The research team developed targeted questions and collected written responses to these open‐ended questions as well as conducting self‐selected student interviews. Student responses were coded to identify the most common misconceptions which were used as distractors a draft multiple choice concept inventory (CI). The draft CI was administered to freshman, sophomore, and upper division undergraduate students. These data were then used to further revise the finalized CI. Pre‐post data are currently being collected to ensure reliability and discriminatory power of this CI. Future studies will include analysis of the persistence of distinct misconceptions across the different student groups, as well as a more thorough analysis of student misconception types and their potential sources.Support or Funding InformationFunded by NSF Award #1710262This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.