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.

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

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 (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.

Assessing stakeholder perceptions of the american society for biochemistry and molecular biology accreditation program for baccalaureate degrees.

The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) began an accreditation program in 2013. The criteria for accreditation of undergraduate programs include sufficient infrastructure - number and expertise of faculty, physical space and equipment, support for faculty and students - and incorporation of core concepts in the curriculum - structure and function of biomolecules; information storage; energy transfer; and quantitative skills. Students in accredited programs are able to have their degrees ASBMB certified by taking an exam focused on knowledge or skills across the four core concept areas. Members of the accreditation committees administered a survey to key stakeholders in the BMB community: undergraduate programs, both those that have applied for accreditation and those that have not; alumni/ae of accredited programs; graduate and professional programs; and employers. The goals of the study were to gauge the success of the program and determine necessary areas of improvement. The results indicate that the major benefits of applying for accreditation are the impetus to gather data and analysis not generally collected, and access to assessment data via the exam. However, stakeholders outside of the undergraduate community showed little awareness of the accreditation program. Additionally, the application process itself was seen to be very time consuming. This feedback will be used to improve the process and engage in further outreach. © 2018 International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 46(5):464-471, 2018.

An expanded framework for biomolecular visualization in the classroom: Learning goals and competencies.

A thorough understanding of the molecular biosciences requires the ability to visualize and manipulate molecules in order to interpret results or to generate hypotheses. While many instructors in biochemistry and molecular biology use visual representations, few indicate that they explicitly teach visual literacy. One reason is the need for a list of core content and competencies to guide a more deliberate instruction in visual literacy. We offer here the second stage in the development of one such resource for biomolecular three-dimensional visual literacy. We present this work with the goal of building a community for online resource development and use. In the first stage, overarching themes were identified and submitted to the biosciences community for comment: atomic geometry; alternate renderings; construction/annotation; het group recognition; molecular dynamics; molecular interactions; monomer recognition; symmetry/asymmetry recognition; structure-function relationships; structural model skepticism; and topology and connectivity. Herein, the overarching themes have been expanded to include a 12th theme (macromolecular assemblies), 27 learning goals, and more than 200 corresponding objectives, many of which cut across multiple overarching themes. The learning goals and objectives offered here provide educators with a framework on which to map the use of molecular visualization in their classrooms. In addition, the framework may also be used by biochemistry and molecular biology educators to identify gaps in coverage and drive the creation of new activities to improve visual literacy. This work represents the first attempt, to our knowledge, to catalog a comprehensive list of explicit learning goals and objectives in visual literacy. © 2016 by The International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 45(1):69-75, 2017.