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Formative assessment is considered to be helpful in students' learning support and teaching design. Following Aufschnaiter's and Alonzo's framework, formative assessment practices of teachers can be subdivided into three practices: eliciting evidence, interpreting evidence and responding. Since students' conceptions are judged to be important for meaningful learning across disciplines, teachers are required to assess their students' conceptions. The focus of this article lies on the discussion of learning analytics for supporting the assessment of students' conceptions in class. The existing and potential contributions of learning analytics are discussed related to the named formative assessment framework in order to enhance the teachers' options to consider individual students' conceptions. We refer to findings from biology and computer science education on existing assessment tools and identify limitations and potentials with respect to the assessment of students' conceptions. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic Students' conceptions are considered to be important for learning processes, but interpreting evidence for learning with respect to students' conceptions is challenging for teachers.Assessment tools have been developed in different educational domains for teaching practice.Techniques from artificial intelligence and machine learning have been applied for automated assessment of specific aspects of learning.What does the paper add Findings on existing assessment tools from two educational domains are summarised and limitations with respect to assessment of students' conceptions are identified.Relevent data that needs to be analysed for insights into students' conceptions is identified from an educational perspective.Potential contributions of learning analytics to support the challenging task to elicit students' conceptions are discussed.Implications for practice and/or policy Learning analytics can enhance the eliciting of students' conceptions.Based on the analysis of existing works, further exploration and developments of analysis techniques for unstructured text and multimodal data are desirable to support the eliciting of students' conceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The premise for this paper was that interdisciplinary teaching - learning is a requisite of modern, formative education. Correlation of the knowledge from various school subjects plays a major part in achieving education as well as in the formation and development of flexible thinking, of the capacity to put the knowledge into practice. Through correlation, knowledge from different fields is better consolidated and systematized, as one discipline helps to the better learning of the other. In this regard, the paper presents a few suggestions on how to approach some contents studied during Biology classes, taking into account the principle of interdisciplinarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on teachers' use of concept mapping as an alternative assessment strategy in advanced level biology classes and its effects on students' cognitive skills on selected biology concepts. Using a mixed methods approach, the study employed a pre-test/post-test quasi-experimental design involving 156 students and 8 teachers from intact classes. A researcher-constructed Biology Cognitive Skills Test was used to collect the quantitative data. Qualitative data were collected through interviews and students' personal documents. The data showed that the participants utilized concept mapping in various ways and they described positive experiences while being engaged in its use. The main challenge cited by teachers was the limited time available for more consistent use. The results showed that the use of concept mapping in advanced level biology can lead to learning gains that exceed those achieved in classes where mainly traditional methods are used. The students in the concept mapping experimental groups performed significantly better than their peers in the control group on both the lower-order (F(1) = 21.508;p < .001) and higher-order (F(1) = 42.842,p < .001) cognitive items of the biology test. A mean effect size of .56 was calculated representing the contribution of treatment to the students' performance on the test items. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

• Biology and other STEM courses with clear structure and regular active learning are associated with improved student performance, particularly for marginalized students. • Small or incremental changes in teaching can increase student interaction with each other and with the instructor. • Moving content to outside of lecture using reading guides or simple videos can make room for active learning during class time. Multiple research studies have shown active learning can increase student performance, reduce fail rates, and increase the success of marginalized students in STEM. In this mini-review we discuss a simple framework for planning and implementing active learning in the classroom. We provide seven strategies to support faculty members who want to implement this framework, with five suggested teaching activities and two mechanisms of creating space in the lecture to use the activities. Each strategy is given with a foundational research paper describing the evidence that it improves learning, engagement and inclusion in the classroom. We include our own experiences using these strategies in large biology lectures that had segments devoted to neuroscience topics, but they are effective in smaller classes as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]