Describing the Development of the Assessment of Biological Reasoning (ABR)

• Published in: Education sciences Vol. 11; no. 11; pp. 669 - 688
• Main Authors: Schellinger, Jennifer, Enderle, Patrick J., Roberts, Kari, Skrob-Martin, Sam, Rhemer, Danielle, Southerland, Sherry A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01-01-2021
• Subjects: assessment; Assessment of Biological Reasoning; biological reasoning; Biology; Classroom Communication; Climate; Climate change; Coding; Cognition & reasoning; College Faculty; College Science; Data Analysis; Discourse Analysis; Elementary Secondary Education; Epistemology; Evidence; Evolution; Experiments; Fundamental Concepts; High School Teachers; Inferences; Knowledge; Knowledge Level; Learner Engagement; Learning; Literature Reviews; Multiple Choice Tests; Organic Chemistry; Persuasive Discourse; Prior Learning; Science education; Science Instruction; Scientific Concepts; Scientific Enterprise; scientific reasoning; Secondary School Science; Student Characteristics; Student Reaction; Students; Teacher Influence; Teaching Methods; Test Construction; Test Reliability; Test Validity; Thinking Skills; three-tiered assessment
• ISSN: 2227-7102; 2227-7102
• DOI: 10.3390/educsci11110669

Assessments of scientific reasoning that capture the intertwining aspects of conceptual, procedural and epistemic knowledge are often associated with intensive qualitative analyses of student responses to open-ended questions, work products, interviews, discourse and classroom observations. While such analyses provide evaluations of students’ reasoning skills, they are not scalable. The purpose of this study is to develop a three-tiered multiple-choice assessment to measure students’ reasoning about biological phenomena and to understand the affordances and limitations of such an assessment. To validate the assessment and to understand what the assessment measures, qualitative and quantitative data were collected and analyzed, including read-aloud, focus group interviews and analysis of large sample data sets. These data served to validate our three-tiered assessment called the Assessment of Biological Reasoning (ABR) consisting of 10 question sets focused on core biological concepts. Further examination of our data suggests that students’ reasoning is intertwined in such a way that procedural and epistemic knowledge is reliant on and given meaning by conceptual knowledge, an idea that pushes against the conceptualization that the latter forms of knowledge construction are more broadly applicable across disciplines.