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Most introductory courses are held in large lecture halls, with students typically sitting in either the front, middle, or back of the classroom. In a mixed-methods study of student attendance, performance, and seat choice, we found that students who chose to sit behind their peers performed nearly a full grade level worse than their peers who sat in the middle and front of the classroom. They also attended class significantly less often than students in the front and middle of the room. Although students sitting in the back had worse performance in all five categories measured (attendance, unit exams, in-class work, final exam, and final course grade), these differences were eliminated by the mediating effect of attendance in all cases but those involving in-class work and unit exams. Students chose to sit where they did for diverse reasons. The results of this study demonstrate the relative importance of attendance and seat position on student performance in a large general biology course.

Genetics plays an increasing role in modern life as evidenced by the development of revolutionary techniques such as CRISPR-based genome editing and the rise of personalized genome services. However, genetics is difficult to learn; known issues include its abstract nature, different scales, and technical language. Pedigree analysis is a convergence of these concepts, requiring use of multiple symbolic scales and understanding the relationships and nature of alleles, genes, and chromosomes. To measure student understanding of these concepts, as well as support biology educational reform toward student-centered instruction, we developed a formative assessment to provide reliable and valid evidence of student understanding, learning, and misconceptions for pedigree analysis. Nine multiple choice items targeted to four learning objectives were developed in an iterative process with faculty and student input. We designed distractor answers to capture common student misconceptions and deployed a novel statistical technique to assess the congruence of distractor language with targeted misconceptions. Psychometric analysis showed the instrument provides valid and reliable data and has utility to measure normalized learning gains. Finally, we employed cross-tabulation and distractor progression to identify several stable misconceptions that can be targeted for instructional intervention.

Most biology undergraduates learn about mutations in multiple classrooms throughout their college career. Understanding personalised genome test results, genome editing controversies, and the appearance of new variants of viruses or antibiotic resistant bacteria all require foundational knowledge about mutations. However, the abstract nature of molecular processes surrounding mutations makes them one of the more difficult topics for students to understand and apply. Instructors need valid assessment tools to document student understanding and tailor their instructional methods to address student knowledge gaps. We describe here the development and validation of the Mutations Criterion Referenced Assessment (MuCRA). This formative assessment was developed through an iterative process involving expert feedback and student responses to both open-ended and multiple-choice questions. The final MuCRA is composed of 10 multiple-choice questions aligned with three learning objectives. The item difficulty for each question was between 0.32–0.65, while the discrimination index ranged from 0.31–0.75 and the reliability (KR20) for the MuCRA was 0.69. The congruence analyses demonstrated distractors are capturing student misconceptions in 9/10 questions. These data indicate that the MuCRA can be used to reliably assess student learning and common misconceptions about mutations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]