Meeting report: BioMolViz workshops for developing assessments of biomolecular visual literacy

Abstract

While molecular visualization has been recognized as a threshold concept in biology education, the explicit assessment of students' visual literacy skills is rare. To facilitate the evaluation of this fundamental ability, a series of NSF‐IUSE‐sponsored workshops brought together a community of faculty engaged in creating instruments to assess students' biomolecular visualization skills. These efforts expanded our earlier work in which we created a rubric describing overarching themes, learning goals, and learning objectives that address student progress toward biomolecular visual literacy. Here, the BioMolViz Steering Committee (http://biomolviz.org) documents the results of those workshops and uses social network analysis to examine the growth of a community of practice. We also share many of the lessons we learned as our workshops evolved, as they may be instructive to other members of the scientific community as they organize workshops of their own.

Seeing Eye to Eye? Comparing Faculty and Student Perceptions of Biomolecular Visualization Assessments

“…Figure 1 outlines our team's five-stage process to develop and validate biomolecular visualization assessments. Items were initially created through three-day workshops, where participants were introduced to backward design using learning objectives from a Biomolecular Visualization Framework [4,36]. Assessments were crafted to target two different levels of learners: novices (students in introductory courses) and amateurs (college junior/seniors who are life science majors).…”