CREATE for STEM Institute, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA.
UC Davis Genome Center, University of California, Davis, Davis, California, USA.
Biochem Mol Biol Educ. 2021 May;49(3):372-382. doi: 10.1002/bmb.21483. Epub 2020 Dec 16.
The core concept of genetic information flow was identified in recent calls to improve undergraduate biology education. Previous work shows that students have difficulty differentiating between the three processes of the Central Dogma (CD; replication, transcription, and translation). We built upon this work by developing and applying an analytic coding rubric to 1050 student written responses to a three-question item about the CD. Each response was previously coded only for correctness using a holistic rubric. Our rubric captures subtleties of student conceptual understanding of each process that previous work has not yet captured at a large scale. Regardless of holistic correctness scores, student responses included five or six distinct ideas. By analyzing common co-occurring rubric categories in student responses, we found a common pair representing two normative ideas about the molecules produced by each CD process. By applying analytic coding to student responses preinstruction and postinstruction, we found student thinking about the processes involved was most prone to change. The combined strengths of analytic and holistic rubrics allow us to reveal mixed ideas about the CD processes and provide a detailed picture of which conceptual ideas students draw upon when explaining each CD process.
遗传信息流的核心概念在最近呼吁改善本科生物学教育的呼声中被确定下来。先前的研究表明，学生很难区分中心法则（CD；复制、转录和翻译）的三个过程。我们在这一工作的基础上，通过开发和应用一个分析编码量表，对 1050 名学生对关于 CD 的三个问题的书面回答进行了分析。每个回答之前都使用整体量表进行了正确性编码。我们的量表捕捉到了学生对每个过程的概念理解的细微差别，而之前的工作尚未在大规模上捕捉到这些差别。无论整体正确性得分如何，学生的回答都包括五个或六个不同的想法。通过分析学生回答中常见的共同出现的量表类别，我们发现了一对常见的类别，代表了关于每个 CD 过程产生的分子的两个规范想法。通过在教学前和教学后对学生的回答进行分析性编码，我们发现学生对所涉及过程的思考最容易发生变化。分析和整体量表的综合优势使我们能够揭示关于 CD 过程的混合想法，并提供一幅详细的画面，说明学生在解释每个 CD 过程时所依据的概念想法。
