Doing coursework without doing biology: undergraduate students’ non-conceptual strategies to problem solving

Development of a Tool to Assess Inference-Making and Reasoning in Biology

“…For each code, a within-subject analysis was used to compare the proportion of utterances verbalized when questions were answered incorrectly relative to those when questions were answered correctly in order to determine which codes were associated with correct answers. Recent research ( 15 , 16 ) shows that many students take approaches to answering questions that are not focused on the use of biological principles and still arrive at the correct response despite wrong thinking. However, our findings support the idea that the IMRB questions require inference-making behavior (not just test-taking strategies or correct prior knowledge) in participating students (e.g., 201 correct inferences were verbalized when the item answer was correct versus 52 when the answer was incorrect).…”

“…Again with cognitive interviews, we empirically determined that when students used methods such as relying on prior knowledge or test-taking strategies, those students were less likely to arrive at a correct response than those engaged in inference-making ( 5 ). Beyond the data, we are confident in making the claim that the IMRB targets inferencing ( 15 ), because when designing the IMRB, we used participants’ correct vocalizations of inferences and incorrect use of other approaches to develop the correct answers and distractors for each item. Therefore, we not only studied the variety of approaches participants use when presented with a given text and figure, we also used that knowledge to build quality items.…”

Defining Understanding

“…For instance, Sato et al (2019) demonstrate that exams in biology courses may not be accurately assessing student understanding, which they define as arriving at a correct answer by "using particular pieces of information to support how they arrived at the answer." Sung et al (2020) explored student response processes more and found that many students use nonconceptual approaches to answer exam questions and may arrive at the correct answer even without a deep conceptual understanding of the concept. Future work could investigate the instructors' definitions of understanding in these contexts to see how their definitions influenced their enacted objects of learning, as well as the impact on students' lived objects of learning.…”

“…These points are further magnified when considering that exams in biology courses may not be accurately assessing student conceptual understanding (Sato et al, 2019), with many students taking nonbiological, nonconceptual strategies in their approach to problems on exams (Sung et al, 2020).…”

Successful Problem Solving in Genetics Varies Based on Question Content

“…Thus far, a handful of studies have investigated the processes adult students use in solving biology problems, and how these processes might influence their ability to develop reasonable answers (Smith and Good, 1984;Smith, 1988;Nehm, 2010;Nehm and Ridgway, 2011;Novick and Catley, 2013;Prevost and Lemons, 2016;Sung et al, 2020). In one study, Prevost and Lemons (2016) collected and analyzed students' written documentation of their problem-solving procedures when answering multiple-choice questions.…”