Students in undergraduate biology courses often struggle to realize the interdisciplinary nature of biology and connect core underlying chemistry content to biological phenomena. Part of the difficulty for students is that current undergraduate biology assessments tend to encourage memorization and assess students’ ability to recall facts, lacking opportunities to make interdisciplinary connections. To address this problem, we are developing assessments that give students the opportunity to make connections between chemistry concepts and biological phenomena. First, biology faculty were surveyed to identify which areas of connection between biology and chemistry they most valued. Based on the survey results, various assessment tasks were developed that incorporate scientific practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas. Here, we focus on an assessment task that investigates how students connect the concepts of entropy and osmosis. The pilot assessment was administered through an online platform to undergraduate students at two universities. Following this pilot and revisions to the task, two additional administrations were carried out, one in which students worked in small groups on the assignment and another where students completed the task individually. This talk will present findings from these administrations, focusing on the ability of students to apply their chemistry knowledge to the biological phenomenon of osmosis.

Assessing students’ ability to create interdisciplinary connections: entropy to osmosis

2019 Spring National Meeting

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