Design and Implementation of a Tool to Assess Students' Understanding of Metabolic Pathways Dynamics and Regulation.

Metabolic systems form the very foundation of life and as such are broadly taught in the molecular life sciences. Here, we describe the biochemistry educator community-based development and use of an assessment instrument designed to evaluate students' ideas about metabolic pathway dynamics and regulation in undergraduate biochemistry courses. Analysis of student responses showed that most students were able to interpret visual representations in an unfamiliar metabolic pathway and that many could make basic predictions about how the system would be expected to respond to changes. However, fewer students generated nuanced responses that accounted for both microscopic changes at the protein level and macroscopic changes in pathway product outputs. These findings identify some of the challenges of meaningfully assessing students' understanding of metabolic pathways and could inform how instructors think about teaching and assessing metabolism in undergraduate biochemistry and beyond. The results also suggest future avenues for biochemistry education research.

Development of a Certification Exam to Assess Undergraduate Students' Proficiency in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Core Concepts.

With support from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), a community of biochemistry and molecular biology (BMB) scientist-educators has developed and administered an assessment instrument designed to evaluate student competence across four core concept and skill areas fundamental to BMB. The four areas encompass energy and metabolism; information storage and transfer; macromolecular structure, function, and assembly; and skills including analytical and quantitative reasoning. First offered in 2014, the exam has now been administered to nearly 4000 students in ASBMB-accredited programs at more than 70 colleges and universities. Here, we describe the development and continued maturation of the exam program, including the organic role of faculty volunteers as drivers and stewards of all facets: content and format selection, question development, and scoring.

Design and testing of an assessment instrument to measure understanding of protein structure and enzyme inhibition in a new context.

Assessment instruments designed to measure student conceptual understanding and skills proficiency related to biochemistry are important to transform undergraduate biochemistry education. The purpose of this study was to develop an assessment instrument to measure student understanding of protein structure and enzyme inhibition in a new context, that of saturable binding. A community of biochemistry educators was involved in an iterative process of designing and testing of this assessment, which consists of true/false and open-ended questions that map to low and high levels in Bloom's taxonomy. A total of 188 students' responses were collected from seven different institutions and were graded by two independent raters using a rubric. Results from this administration indicate that most students were able to answer the questions related to lower-levels in Bloom's taxonomy; however for higher-level questions, students had more difficulty. The results from this assessment can give instructors insight into the ways in which persistent incorrect or incomplete ideas related to protein structure and binding events can hinder knowledge application. Also, the use of a community of practice to develop assessment instruments of this type and the format of the instrument itself could be a useful model for development of assessment instruments in the future.

Probing and improving student's understanding of protein α-helix structure using targeted assessment and classroom interventions in collaboration with a faculty community of practice.

The increasing availability of concept inventories and other assessment tools in the molecular life sciences provides instructors with myriad avenues to probe student understanding. For example, although molecular visualization is central to the study of biochemistry, a growing body of evidence suggests that students have substantial limitations in their ability to recognize and interpret basic features of biological macromolecules. In this study, a pre/posttest administered to students at diverse institutions nationwide revealed a robust incorrect idea about the location of the amino acid side chains in the protein α-helix structure. Because this incorrect idea was present even after a semester of biochemistry instruction at a range of institutions, an intervention was necessary. A community of expert biochemistry instructors collaborated to design two active learning classroom activities that systematically examine α-helix structure and function. Several participating faculty used one or both of the activities in their classrooms and some improvement of student understanding of this concept was observed. This study provides a model of how a community of instructors can work together using assessment data to inform targeted changes in instruction with the goal of improving student understanding of fundamental concepts.

Development and analysis of an instrument to assess student understanding of foundational concepts before biochemistry coursework.

Biochemistry is a challenging subject because student learning depends on the application of previously learned concepts from general chemistry and biology to new, biological contexts. This article describes the development of a multiple-choice instrument intended to measure five concepts from general chemistry and three from biology that are considered prerequisite for biochemistry learning. This instrument is specifically designed with a factor structure that includes three multiple-choice items for each of the eight concepts and the most common incorrect ideas that students could have as distractors. It can be used as a pretest to identify students' incorrect ideas about those concepts and to determine if instruction helps students overcome those incorrect ideas when used as a posttest. Results from a confirmatory factor analysis support a very good fit for an eight-factor solution. This manuscript represents a report on the current state of instrument development. We seek to share our methods and instrument design principles with the broader community.