Grades in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses are distributed under the assumption that high‐performing students have a strong understanding of the material. Similarly, the STEM education literature often presents exam performance as equivalent to understanding. Despite these assumptions, we have little knowledge regarding student thinking in relation to exam scores. To investigate this relationship, we asked undergraduate students to complete a series of written and verbal tasks. Twenty‐two participants were presented with biology questions and were instructed to write exam‐like responses along with their thought process. More than half of the participants then took part in retrospective interviews. We graded the exam‐like responses to award a performance score and coded the entirety of participants' writing for their understanding. We found a discrepancy between performance and understanding for over one quarter of our data. Furthermore, interviews allowed for a more complete picture of participant understanding than written responses. These results contribute to calls for re‐evaluating our course assessments and for questioning the understanding those assessments value. © 2019 International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 47(3):296–302, 2019.

Instructors communicate what they value about students’ written work through their comments and feedback, and this feedback has the potential to direct how students approach writing assignments. In this study, we examined how graduate student teaching assistants (TAs) attended and responded to students’ written lab reports in an introductory biology course. We collected and analyzed marked lab reports from five TAs and interviewed them about their marking decisions. The results show that TAs attended mainly to writing style and form in their markings and comments on lab reports. However, there were occasions when they attended to students’ scientific reasoning in their markings and during interviews. We provide evidence that TAs’ understanding of the purpose of the laboratory course and assessment structure influenced their attention. We also provide evidence that TAs could shift their attention from style and form to reasoning in response to moment-to-moment contextual cues. Building on these results, we discuss course design and professional development that reframes labs and reports to focus on students’ biological reasoning.

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The student evaluation, used to measure students’ perceptions of teacher performance, has been increasingly used as the predominant component in assessing teaching effectiveness (Waters et al. 1988), and the widespread movement of outcomes assessment across the country makes this trend likely to continue in the future (McCoy et al. 1994, AACSB 1994, SACS 1995).  Substantial research has been conducted with regard to the reliability and accuracy of student evaluation of teaching quality, and a considerable number of uncontrollable factors are found to bias the results of the evaluation rating.  This paper identifies one more factor.  Each student has an “evaluator profile”, which decreases the reliability of the student evaluation.  An “evaluator profile” is a persistent pattern of evaluating behavior that may or may not be consistent with the quality of the characteristic being evaluated.  Each class of students consists of a random sample of different evaluator profiles.  A student evaluation rating of a teacher’s performance is biased up or down depending on the concentration of high or low evaluator profiles present.  This paper further shows through simulation the degree to which student “evaluator profiles” impact the overall student evaluation rating of teacher performance. We find that there is evidence to support the “evaluator profile” conjecture, and that these “evaluator profiles” do in fact have the potential to change overall student evaluation ratings substantially.

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