Amanda Erickson

Educators constantly refine curricula in order to improve the presentation and ordering of concepts to better help students organize and assimilate new, abstract concepts and skills with their prior knowledge. The development of visual literacy skills has the potential to aid in this endeavor, particularly in the molecular life science curricula where representations are varied, abstract, and widely used. To date, there are few tools that measure visual literacy skills. This study aims to develop such a tool that can measure the structural knowledge, or neural networks, of participants with respect to the horizontal translation of the enzyme-substrate concept. We used the Pathfinder program to evaluate experts' and students' responses to a survey where participants ranked the similarity of enzyme-substrate related images. Pathfinder generated a correlation, path length correlation (PLC), and network similarity (NS) value, and the neural network image for each participant. Student survey data were analyzed against an established expert reference network. In our preliminary results, we compare the neural network data of undergraduate students from a small, primarily undergraduate institution to those from a large R-1 university. Results of this research suggest ways to alter curricula to improve student organization of knowledge and improve memory retention of visual literacy skills in the molecular life sciences.