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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. 

BioMolViz is a community of practice dedicated to improving biomolecular visualization instruction. Guided by a framework of learning objectives for biomolecular visualization skills, our initial project goal was to create a repository of validated assessments to evaluate students’ visual literacy. In 2018, the team was awarded one year of seed funding, which led to a four-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. This support allowed BioMolViz to flourish into a community of educators in professional development workshops and working groups, where teams of participants aimed to design effective and accessible assessments to evaluate students’ biomolecular visual literacy. As the project advanced, we piloted these items in classrooms across the United States. Through a small-scale classroom testing study, we compared student and instructor perceptions of assessment difficulty, while large-scale testing revealed performance patterns that reinforced the need to understand distinct student perspectives. This led us to evaluate students’ problem-solving strategies through surveys and semi-structured interviews. Based on this work, we argue that a reimagining of the curriculum can begin with faculty, but must include productive student partnerships to enact effective change. We offer our repository of visual literacy assessments, the BioMolViz Library, as an instructor resource shaped by the student perspective, and present a new instructor training resource recently produced by our working group. As we approach the close of our funding cycle, we offer our ideas and invite conversations on fostering long-term sustainability for our robust community of practice, under all future resource models. 

We describe the development of a one-credit course to promote AI literacy at the University of Texas at Austin. In response to a call for the rapid deployment of class that would serve a broad audience in Fall of 2023, we designed a 14-week seminar-style course that incorporated an interdisciplinary group of speakers who lectured on topics ranging from the fundamentals of AI to societal concerns including disinformation and employment. University students, faculty, and staff, and even community members outside of the University were invited to enroll in this online offering: The Essentials of AI for Life and Society. We collected feedback from course participants through weekly reflections and a final survey. Satisfyingly, we found that attendees reported gains in their AI literacy. We sought critical feedback through quantitative and qualitative analysis, which uncovered challenges in designing a course for this general audience. We utilized the course feedback to design a three-credit version of the course that is being offered in Fall of 2024. The lessons we learned and our plans for this new iteration may serve as a guide to instructors designing AI courses for a broad audience. 

A critical skill that biochemistry students must develop is the interpretation of molecular images, ranging from macromolecular representations to the chemical structures of the building blocks that comprise them. Such analysis requires biomolecular visual literacy, which is not often explicitly taught, and can be challenging for instructors to assess. In this work, we examine student responses to assessments designed to probe biomolecular visual literacy. Analysis of sets of assessments with classical test theory indicates that items which have undergone an iterative validation process, including expert review, perform well in classroom testing. However, the evaluation of multiple-choice and multiple-select assessment items based on classroom testing alone has limitations. Therefore, semistructured student interviews were used to explore student approaches to molecular visualization problem solving. Qualitative analysis of interview transcripts identified several common strategies among students when solving image-based questions, including relying on color in the images to answer questions, drawing on familiar terminology in the prompt, and using process-of-elimination to identify the best answer. Image complexity was identified as a common challenge for students. Instructors can craft more effective assessments by paying careful attention to the use of color in images, using terminology students are familiar with, carefully creating distractors, and using images with complexity appropriate to the learner level. This work underscores the importance of the student perspective in the design of assessments used by educators to evaluate learning. 

Managing large-scale projects in biomolecular visualization education presents unique challenges, especially when involving many contributors who generate resources over time. BioMolViz is a diverse group of faculty from multiple institutions promoting biomolecular visualization literacy, and our goal was to create a collaboratively designed repository of assessments to allow evaluation of students’ visual literacy skills. As we expanded our network and engaged large numbers of educators through online and in-person workshops and working groups, assessment ideas and revisions became challenging to organize. Our growing repository required a method to 1) track revisions, expert-panel reviews, and field-testing results, and 2) ultimately publish hundreds of visual literacy assessments. As we navigated this new space, we sought to streamline our approach, while continuing to engage valuable colleagues with varying levels of comfort with technology. Through collaboration tools, project management software, and a series of fits and starts, the internal team established a structured workflow that efficiently guided assessment items from development to public access. Project management software enabled effective collaboration across team members and ensured transparency and efficiency in tracking each item’s progress. We detail the trial-and-error process that enabled collaborative assessment design, our breakthrough in the identification of software that suited the project needs, and the process of guiding developers to create the repository we envisioned. Our workflow analysis offers a model for leveraging project management tools in similar educational contexts and optimizing database design. 

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. 

An Open educational Resource guide for instructors in using molecular visualization in their teaching. 

A comprehensive understanding of biochemistry and molecular biology should empower students to address today's most pressing global challenges (GCs). However, the common types of assessment questions in biochemistry texts do not provide the context or training to encourage students to apply concepts broadly to world issues. The typical end-of-chapter problems presented are not often summative across chapters and are less likely to focus on research findings. Moreover, most do not help students read and analyze the scientific literature, an arguably difficult task that is critical to understanding and approaching solutions to GCs. To address these shortcomings, we have developed a new approach for assessment questions and incorporated them in the online, multivolume Open Educational Resource (OER), Fundamentals of Biochemistry LibreText. These Literature-based Guided Assessments (LGAs) are linked to the primary literature and designed to guide students in reading and understanding research papers. Most of the LGAs are also linked to the leading GCs that face the world today. We highlight an LGA on the Voltage-gated Sodium Channel that was developed through a summer workshop sponsored by BioMolViz and used in a classroom setting in the following fall semester. We describe the development and implementation of the activity, along with preliminary data from an introduction to protein modeling course. We also have written LGAs that focus on Trauma and Health as well as Carbon Capture Using Carbonic Anhydrase (centered on the GCs of Trauma and Climate Change, respectively), and two on Visual Images and Data (focused on Information Integrity). Importantly, these topics encourage students to think past the typical biomedical questions that can become the focus of courses targeted to premedical students. We invite members of the community to use these LGAs in their classrooms and propose GCs of interest for future modules. NSF 1920270: RCN-UBE: Development of an Inclusive Community for the Instruction of Visualizing Biomolecules. Department of Education Open Textbook Pilot Project.