1 / 10

Five Month Retention of Basic Genetics Knowledge Following an Introductory Biology Course

Five Month Retention of Basic Genetics Knowledge Following an Introductory Biology Course. Peter Busher and Andy Andres Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics College of General Studies . Background. Increasing importance of assessment

dafydd
Download Presentation

Five Month Retention of Basic Genetics Knowledge Following an Introductory Biology Course

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Five Month Retention of Basic Genetics Knowledge Following an Introductory Biology Course Peter Busherand Andy Andres Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics College of General Studies

  2. Background Increasing importance of assessment Common assessment is pretesting existing student knowledge Sometimes followed by post course testing using same instrument

  3. College of General Studies • Unique Team Structure • Students are with same Faculty Team for two semesters • Teach Intro Human Genetics in the Fall on CGS Teams X and Y • Required course for CGS students • Student are mostly non-science majors • Busher: Team X; Andres: Team Y • Fall 2011 decided to Pretest student knowledge in Genetics

  4. What We Did • Sept. 2011 gave a pretest first day in class: • 30 questions • Various conceptual, factual, et al., type questions covering some basic concepts in human genetics • Dec. 2011 repeated same 30 Qs on student’s final exam. • No students reported back to us they noticed they were the same Qs

  5. What We Did Guess what we found? Shocking result: students improved… We were interested in how students retained science knowledge Due to cramming behavior observed in intro classes, ourhypothesis was that students would not retain the knowledge gained during the fall course Results convinced us it was worth doing more rigorously in Academic Year 2012-13

  6. First Results (N = 15), Fall 2011-Spring 2012 32% 77% 61%

  7. More Results, Fall 2012-Spring 2013 30% 70% 109 Students on Teams X and Y took the Sept. Pretest and Final Exam This is the familiar pretest/post-test assessment

  8. More Results, Fall 2012-Spring 2013 28% 70% 52% 69 Students on Teams X and Y took the Pretest, Final, and May Post-test By Repeated Measures ANOVA all scores are significantly different (P < 0.0001) from each other

  9. Results: Real Data Stories Top and bottom pretest scorer improve and retain similarly Performed well on Final Exam, little retention Not much change, good retention Some students improved five months later!

  10. What Does it Mean? We think retention of knowledge is an important component of assessment Introductory Genetics students retain genetics knowledge after five months of studying the material

More Related