Two University of Queensland academics are developing a new approach that will help biology educators all over the world.
Dr Tony Wright from the School of Education and Professor Susan Hamilton from the School of Molecular and Microbial Sciences recently won one of four Priority Project Grants awarded by the Carrick Institute to develop a new teaching tool for the molecular life sciences.
The $200,000 grant focuses on teaching, learning and assessment in the molecular life sciences and will involve collaboration amongst universities around Australia.
The project, Diagnostic Assessment for Biological Sciences – Development of a Concept Inventory, involves developing a rigorous approach to assessing how well students understand fundamental ideas.
Dr Wright said biology was becoming such a complex area of study that it was difficult to keep tabs on whether students understood concepts.
“The issue is that students learn a lot of stuff but they don’t always have a good understanding of the big ideas involved,” he said.
“The project’s allowing us to develop assessment tasks that uncover what students think about these big ideas.”
Once the project is complete, it will involve students completing a sophisticated web-based test that uncovers their understanding.
The quiz will be an “adaptive test”, where the computer program chooses questions based on a student’s previous answers. The questions will focus on common misconceptions among students.
Professor Hamilton said one of the challenges in modern biology was to obtain international consensus around big ideas because of rapid development in the molecular life sciences.
“We’re hoping it will have an impact on the curriculum in biology in this area. We’ve got to collapse it back into key concepts,” she said.
To aid in achieving this global agreement, the project has support through the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the project team includes members from South Africa and Portugal as well as Dr Susan Howitt from the Australian National University.
The development team also includes Associate Professor Warren Laffan and Dr Asad Khan from the UQ Social Sciences Research Centre who will oversee the construction and validation of the inventory.
With such international involvement in the project, the concept inventory could potentially be used as a teaching tool in universities all over the world and become a model for future, similar projects to help teachers refine their teaching methods.
In the longer term the tools will help educators revitalise undergraduate curricula and better understand the changing nature of biology students.
Media: Dr Tony Wright (07 3365 6465), Professor Susan Hamilton (07 3365 1323) or Tegan Taylor at UQ Communications (07 3365 2339).
