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For over a decade, the BioMolViz group has been working to improve biomolecular visualization instruction and assessment. Through workshops that engaged educators in visual assessment writing and revision, this community has produced hundreds of assessment items, a subset of which are freely available to educators through online repository, the BioMolViz Library. Assessment items are at various stages of a validation process developed by BioMolViz. To establish evidence of validity, these items were iteratively revised by instructors, reviewed by an expert panel, and tested in classrooms. Here, we describe the results of the final phase our validation process, which involved classroom testing across 10 United Statesbased colleges and universities with over 700 students. Classical test theory was applied to evaluate 26 multiplechoice or multipleselect items divided across two assessment sets. The results indicate that the validation process was successful in producing assessments that performed within our defined ideal range for difficulty and discrimination indices, with only four items outside of this scale. However, some assessments showed performance differences among student demographic groups. Thus, we added an interview phase to our process, which involved 20 student participants across three institutions. In these semistructured group interviews, students described their problemsolving strategies, adding their unique insights as the discussion progressed. As these interview transcripts were qualitatively coded, areas to further improve assessment items were identified. We will illustrate the progression of several items through the entire validation process and discuss how student problem solving strategies can be leveraged to guide effective assessment design.
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This content will become publicly available on May 1, 2026
Abstract 1286 Voicing Visual Literacy: Student Interviews to Improve Biomolecular Visualization Assessments
For a decade, BioMolViz has been developing tools to improve visual literacy instruction. In collaboration with the biochemistry and molecular biology (BMB) education community, our group authored a Biomolecular Visualization Framework to assess visual literacy skills and used the framework’s learning objectives in the backward design of assessments. Our validation process, which includes iterative revision by our working group of faculty, expert panel review, and large-scale classroom testing, has produced a subset of validated assessments which are available in our online repository, the BioMolViz Library. Nearly 200 assessments are now moving through the earlier phases of our validation process. With an eye always on inclusivity, we used our large-scale field testing data to examine performance trends. Upon observing some differences in performance that correlated with gender and race, we organized semi-structured interviews with small groups of undergraduate students to further evaluate our assessments. Disaggregating students into groups by gender, we asked students to share initial impressions and engage in collaborative reflection on their problem solving strategies. As we thematically code our interview transcripts, which include male and female groups from three U.S.-based institutions, we seek to further improve the clarity of our assessments, while exploring approaches to problem solving that may uncover demographic-related differences and make visual literacy more inclusive for all learners.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1920270
- PAR ID:
- 10643930
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASBMB
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Biological Chemistry
- Volume:
- 301
- Issue:
- S
- ISSN:
- 0021-9258
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 108576
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Associated Dataset(s):
- View Associated Dataset(s) >>
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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