Identifying Troublesome Jargon in Biology: Discrepancies between Student Performance and Perceived Understanding

Abstract

The excessive “jargon” load in biology may be a hurdle for developing conceptual understanding as well as achieving core competencies such as scientific literacy and communication. Little work has been done to characterize student understanding of biology-­specific jargon. To address this issue, we aimed to determine the types of biology jargon terms that students struggle with most, the alignment between students’ perceived understanding and performance defining the terms, and common errors in student-provided definitions. Students in two biology classes were asked to report their understanding of, and provide definitions for, course-specific vocabulary terms: 1276 student responses to 72 terms were analyzed. Generally, students showed an overestimation of their own understanding. The least accurate self-assessment occurred for terms to which students had substantial prior exposure and terms with discordant meanings in biology versus everyday language. Students were more accurate when assessing their understanding of terms describing abstract molecular structures, and these were often perceived as more difficult than other types of terms. This research provides insights about which types of technical vocabulary may create a barrier to developing deeper conceptual understanding, and highlights a need to consider student understanding of different types of jargon in supporting learning and scientific literacy.

To What Extent Do Study Habits Relate to Performance?

“…Additionally, we found that particular active study strategies—explanation, self-quizzing, and answering problem sets—were uniquely predictive of higher performance in a biology course context. Undergraduate biology courses introduce a large amount of discipline-specific terminology, in addition to requiring the higher-order prediction and application skills found among STEM courses ( Wandersee, 1988 ; Zukswert et al , 2019 ). This is true for the course studied here, which covers biochemistry and molecular genetics, and the assessments that we used as our outcomes reflect this combination of terminology, comprehension, prediction, and application skills.…”

Online and Clicker Quizzing on Jargon Terms Enhances Definition-Focused but Not Conceptually Focused Biology Exam Performance

“…A direct comparison of the jargon-free versus jargon-first approaches, as well as more direct measures of cognitive load, may be revealing as well. Future work might also incorporate free-response assessments wherein the usage of jargon terms can be more extensively analyzed (Zukswert et al , 2019). Finally, the selection of jargon terms according to normed data or a detailed analysis of their specific usage in course materials may also yield insights.…”

Pan, Cooke, Little, McDaniel, Foster, Connor, & Rickard (2019) Online and clicker quizzing on jargon terms enhances definition-focused but not conceptually-focused biology exam performance (preprint)

“…A direct comparison of the jargon-free versus jargon-first approaches, as well as more direct measures of cognitive load, may be revealing as well. Future work might also incorporate free-response assessments wherein the usage of jargon terms can be more extensively analyzed (Zukswert, Barker, & McDonnell, 2019). Finally, the selection of jargon terms according to normed data or a detailed analysis of their specific usage in course materials may also yield insights.…”