School of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588.
Biology Department, Truman State University, Kirksville, MO 63501.
CBE Life Sci Educ. 2023 Jun;22(2):ar27. doi: 10.1187/cbe.22-09-0181.
Biology instructors use concept assessments in their courses to gauge student understanding of important disciplinary ideas. Instructors can choose to administer concept assessments based on participation (i.e., lower stakes) or the correctness of responses (i.e., higher stakes), and students can complete the assessment in an in-class or out-of-class setting. Different administration conditions may affect how students engage with and perform on concept assessments, thus influencing how instructors should interpret the resulting scores. Building on a validity framework, we collected data from 1578 undergraduate students over 5 years under five different administration conditions. We did not find significant differences in scores between lower-stakes in-class, higher-stakes in-class, and lower-stakes out-of-class conditions, indicating a degree of equivalence among these three options. We found that students were likely to spend more time and have higher scores in the higher-stakes out-of-class condition. However, we suggest that instructors cautiously interpret scores from this condition, as it may be associated with an increased use of external resources. Taken together, we highlight the lower-stakes out-of-class condition as a widely applicable option that produces outcomes similar to in-class conditions, while respecting the common desire to preserve classroom instructional time.
生物学教师在课程中使用概念评估来衡量学生对重要学科思想的理解。教师可以选择根据参与度（即低风险）或回答的正确性（即高风险）来管理概念评估，并且学生可以在课堂内或课堂外完成评估。不同的管理条件可能会影响学生对概念评估的参与和表现，从而影响教师应该如何解释由此产生的分数。基于有效性框架，我们在五年内收集了来自 1578 名本科生在五种不同管理条件下的数据。我们没有发现低风险课堂内、高风险课堂内和低风险课堂外条件之间的分数存在显著差异，这表明这三种选择具有一定的等效性。我们发现学生在高风险课外条件下可能会花费更多的时间并且获得更高的分数。但是，我们建议教师谨慎解释这种条件下的分数，因为它可能与更多地使用外部资源有关。总的来说，我们强调低风险课外条件是一种广泛适用的选择，它产生的结果与课堂内条件相似，同时尊重保留课堂教学时间的共同愿望。
