Using the Biology Card Sorting Task to Measure Changes in Conceptual Expertise during Postsecondary Biology Education.

ABSTRACT: While there have been concerted efforts to reform undergraduate biology toward teaching students to organize their conceptual knowledge like experts, there are few tools that attempt to measure this. We previously developed the Biology Card Sorting Task (BCST), designed to probe how individuals organize their conceptual biological knowledge. Previous results showed the BCST could differentiate between different populations, namely non-biology majors (NBM) and biology faculty (BF). In this study, we administered the BCST to three additional populations, using a cross-sectional design: entering biology majors (EBM), advanced biology majors (ABM), and biology graduate students (BGS). Intriguingly, ABM did not initially sort like experts any more frequently than EBM. However, once the deep-fea

SUBMITTER: Bissonnette SA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5332040 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature