This study explored how using in-class accountability affects the nature of students’ clicker question discussions. A higher proportion of discussions in the random call condition contained exchanges of reasoning and some forms of questioning compared with discussion in the volunteer call condition, thus suggesting positive impacts of random calling.
Understanding student ideas in large-enrollment biology courses can be challenging, because easy-to-administer multiple-choice questions frequently do not fully capture the diversity of student ideas. As part of the Automated Analysis of Constructed Responses (AACR) project, we designed a question prompting students to describe the possible effects of a mutation in a noncoding region of DNA. We characterized answers from 1127 students enrolled in eight different large-enrollment introductory biology courses at three different institutions over five semesters and generated an analytic scoring system containing three categories of correct ideas and five categories of incorrect ideas. We iteratively developed a computer model for scoring student answers and tested the model before and after implementing an instructional activity designed to help a new set of students explore this concept. After completing a targeted activity and re-answering the question, students showed improvement from preassessment, with 64% of students in incorrect and 67% of students in partially incorrect (mixed) categories shifting to correct ideas only. This question, computer-scoring model, and instructional activity can now be reliably used by other instructors to better understand and characterize student ideas on the effects of mutations outside a gene-coding region.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.