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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.