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New graduate students in biology programs may lack the quantitative skills necessary for their research and professional careers. The acquisition of these skills may be impeded by teaching and mentoring experiences that decrease rather than increase students’ beliefs in their ability to learn and apply quantitative approaches. In this opinion piece, we argue that revising instructional experiences to ensure that both student confidence and quantitative skills are enhanced may improve both educational outcomes and professional success. A few studies suggest that explicitly addressing productive failure in an instructional setting and ensuring effective mentoring may be the most effective routes to simultaneously increasing both quantitative self-efficacy and quantitative skills. However, there is little work that specifically addresses graduate student needs, and more research is required to reach evidence-backed conclusions.

Genetics plays an increasing role in modern life as evidenced by the development of revolutionary techniques such as CRISPR-based genome editing and the rise of personalized genome services. However, genetics is difficult to learn; known issues include its abstract nature, different scales, and technical language. Pedigree analysis is a convergence of these concepts, requiring use of multiple symbolic scales and understanding the relationships and nature of alleles, genes, and chromosomes. To measure student understanding of these concepts, as well as support biology educational reform toward student-centered instruction, we developed a formative assessment to provide reliable and valid evidence of student understanding, learning, and misconceptions for pedigree analysis. Nine multiple choice items targeted to four learning objectives were developed in an iterative process with faculty and student input. We designed distractor answers to capture common student misconceptions and deployed a novel statistical technique to assess the congruence of distractor language with targeted misconceptions. Psychometric analysis showed the instrument provides valid and reliable data and has utility to measure normalized learning gains. Finally, we employed cross-tabulation and distractor progression to identify several stable misconceptions that can be targeted for instructional intervention.

Most biology undergraduates learn about mutations in multiple classrooms throughout their college career. Understanding personalised genome test results, genome editing controversies, and the appearance of new variants of viruses or antibiotic resistant bacteria all require foundational knowledge about mutations. However, the abstract nature of molecular processes surrounding mutations makes them one of the more difficult topics for students to understand and apply. Instructors need valid assessment tools to document student understanding and tailor their instructional methods to address student knowledge gaps. We describe here the development and validation of the Mutations Criterion Referenced Assessment (MuCRA). This formative assessment was developed through an iterative process involving expert feedback and student responses to both open-ended and multiple-choice questions. The final MuCRA is composed of 10 multiple-choice questions aligned with three learning objectives. The item difficulty for each question was between 0.32-0.65, while the discrimination index ranged from 0.31-0.75 and the reliability (KR20) for the MuCRA was 0.69. The congruence analyses demonstrated distractors are capturing student misconceptions in 9/10 questions. These data indicate that the MuCRA can be used to reliably assess student learning and common misconceptions about mutations.