A Call for Programmatic Assessment of Undergraduate Students’ Conceptual Understanding and Higher-Order Cognitive Skills

Abstract

In response to empirical evidence and calls for change, individual undergraduate biology instructors are reforming their pedagogical practices. To assess the effectiveness of these reforms, many instructors use course-specific or skill-specific assessments (e.g., concept inventories). We commend our colleagues’ noble efforts, yet we contend that this is only a starting point. In this Perspectives article, we argue that departments need to engage in reform and programmatic assessment to produce graduates who have both subject-matter knowledge and higher-order cognitive skills. We encourage biology education researchers to work collaboratively with content specialists to develop program-level assessments aimed at measuring students’ conceptual understanding and higher-order cognitive skills, and we encourage departments to develop longitudinal plans for monitoring their students’ development of these skills.

Insight from Biology Program Learning Outcomes: Implications for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment

“…Taken together, these results indicate that programs may still be emphasizing or teaching LOC skills, consistent with work that has found that many introductory biology courses are focusing on LOC skills and that upper-division biology classes may still retain this focus on LOC skills ( Momsen et al. , 2010 ; Cleveland et al. , 2017 ).…”

“…, 2017 ). This has led to recent calls for biology programs to develop program objectives that focus on HOC skills ( Cleveland et al. , 2017 ), and we echo such calls for undergraduate biology programs to reflect on their PLOs and determine whether there are ways to integrate more HOC skills into their PLOs and curricula.…”