Assessments that reveal student conceptual understanding are especially important and useful for this goal in undergraduate STEM education ( Smith and Tanner, 2010). Ultimately, the goal of assessment is to improve student learning ( Wiggins, 1998 Pellegrino et al., 2001 Pellegrino, 2006). The information gained from assessment allows instructors to make important and timely instructional and curricular decisions ( Pellegrino et al., 2001 Pellegrino, 2006). Instructors need assessments that can reveal the nature of student understanding in order to improve and evaluate student learning.Īssessment is an important classroom practice. However, substantial research in biology education has documented that undergraduates in introductory-level courses have a number of alternative conceptions about cellular respiration and photosynthesis that are grounded in a failure to trace matter through biological systems ( Wilson et al., 2006 Hartley et al., 2011 Maskiewicz et al., 2012 Parker et al., 2012, 2013). A common fundamental principle in these calls is tracing matter through biological processes. This is an attempt to help students see connections between different science disciplines and to draw connections between units/chapters within a course. National calls for biology and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education reform are shifting the focus of STEM instruction from a collection of facts to a focus on key concepts or principles in the disciplines ( American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2011 Achieve, 2013). However, this confusion was not specific to a single version. Students identified the prompts as both relevant and confusing. During the interviews, we found that students thought that the plant species was neither relevant nor confusing when answering the question. We conducted 20 face-to-face interviews with students to further probe the effects of question wording on student responses. We found that there was not a significant difference in the content of student responses to versions of the question stem with different species or order of prompts, using both computerized lexical analysis and expert scoring. We asked four versions of the question with different combinations of the two plant species and order of prompts in an introductory cell biology course. We investigated how student written responses to constructed-response questions about photosynthesis vary based on two surface features of the question: the species of plant and the order of two question prompts. One challenge in science education assessment is that students often focus on surface features of questions rather than the underlying scientific principles.
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