Audrey Rodewald

In 2011, the Vision and Change (V&C) framework was presented as a solution to evolving undergraduate biology education goals, both those set by instructors for biology literacy and those pertaining to the individual interests of their students. After a decade, the time has come to assess its success in practice. Successful implementation of V&C would promote students’ abilities to think critically about and make connections between biological concepts. To determine how this type of thinking affects student performance in a V&C-guided curriculum, data was collected by coding the weekly reflections of 38 students in an introductory biology course (BIOL 1951) and an upper-level genetics course (BIOL 4003). Codes were categorized as either broad (relating to topics outside of the course) or course-focused (directly relating to a student’s experiences within the course). The proportion of broad codes for each reflection was compared to exam score using a one-way ANOVA. Significant correlation was identified for the week 2, 6, and 12 reflections for BIOL 1951 students, and no significant correlations were identified for BIOL 4003 students. The reflection prompts for the three weeks with significant correlations all asked students to reflect on their learning in general (not specifically relating to V&C concepts and skills). It is possible that this promotes student discussion of a wide breadth of topics related to their learning and thus greater frequency of broad codes reflects the types of thinking needed to perform well on exams. Continued research should utilize both expanding sample sizes to further validate previous findings and recoding of reflections to analyze the effect of broad vs focused study habits on exam performance.