Andrea Lawrence

Biochemistry relies on complex visual representations to convey information thereby making it a difficult discipline to master. Improving students’ visual literacy skills can lessen their cognitive load and facilitate learning when these representations are easier to understand. There is little existing research that assesses how students interpret and store biochemical information and representations in their memory. Studies performed with undergraduate chemistry students measured students’ structural knowledge, or neural networks, of topics by asking them to rank the relatedness of different chemistry-related words/phrases. Our study aims to determine participants' neural networks of a biochemistry visual literacy skill by asking them to rank the relatedness of biochemical representations instead of words/phrases. Specifically this tool assesses participants' structural knowledge of the vertical translation visual literacy skill with respect to the oxygen binding concept. Student responses are analyzed in Pathfinder against an expert reference network to determine the correlation, path length correlation (PLC), and network similarity (NS), and generate a neural network image. Preliminary results compare undergraduate chemistry and biochemistry students from a small, primarily undergraduate institution with students from a large, R-1 university to assess if pedagogical strategies and course instructional modalities impact students neural networks related to the oxygen binding concept. The findings of this study could aid the development of curricular materials for optimal learning and retention of information.