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A Modified CREATE Intervention Improves Student Cognitive and Affective Outcomes in an Upper-Division Genetics Course.

ABSTRACT: Many national reports have called for undergraduate biology education to incorporate research and analytical thinking into the curriculum. In response, interventions have been developed and tested. CREATE (Consider, Read, Elucidate the hypotheses, Analyze and interpret the data, and Think of the next Experiment) is an instructional strategy designed to engage students in learning core concepts and competencies through careful reading of primary literature in a scaffolded fashion. CREATE has been successfully implemented by many instructors across diverse institutional contexts and has been shown to help students develop in the affective, cognitive, and epistemological domains, consistent with broader meta-analyses demonstrating the effectiveness of active learning. Nonetheless, some studies on CREATE have reported discrepant results, raising important questions on effectiveness in relation to the fidelity and integrity of implementation. Here, we describe an upper-division genetics course that incorporates a modified version of CREATE. Similar to the original CREATE instructional strategy, our intervention's design was based on existing learning principles. Using existing concept inventories and validated survey instruments, we found that our modified CREATE intervention promotes higher affective and cognitive gains in students in contrast to three comparison groups. We also found that students tended to underpredict their learning and performance in the modified CREATE intervention, while students in some comparison groups had the opposite trend. Together, our results contribute to the expanding literature on how and why different implementations of the same active-learning strategy contribute to student outcomes.

SUBMITTER: Lo SM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7198224 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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A Modified CREATE Intervention Improves Student Cognitive and Affective Outcomes in an Upper-Division Genetics Course.

Lo Stanley M SM Luu Tiffany B TB Tran Justin J

Journal of microbiology & biology education 20200430 1

Many national reports have called for undergraduate biology education to incorporate research and analytical thinking into the curriculum. In response, interventions have been developed and tested. CREATE (Consider, Read, Elucidate the hypotheses, Analyze and interpret the data, and Think of the next Experiment) is an instructional strategy designed to engage students in learning core concepts and competencies through careful reading of primary literature in a scaffolded fashion. CREATE has been ...[more]

PMID: 32431773

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Project description:BackgroundStudy motivation and knowledge retention benefit from regular student self-assessments. Inclusion of certainty-based learning (CBL) in computer-assisted formative tests may further enhance this by enabling students to identify whether they are uninformed or misinformed regarding the topics tested, which may trigger future study actions including instructor consultation.MethodsUsing a cross-over study design involving two out of thirteen computer-assisted formative assessments (CAFAs) of a first-year cell biology course, we compared student-instructor interactions, student learning experiences and final exam scores between two (bio)medical science student cohorts who worked with different CBL-containing CAFAs.ResultsA total of 389 students participated in the study. After completion 159 (41%) filled in a questionnaire on their experience with CBL during supervised CAFAs. In the control group the median duration of student-instructor interactions was 90 s (range 60-140 s), and this increased with 20 s to 110 s (range 60-150 s) in the group working with a CBL-based CAFA. The number of interactions was similar in both groups (0.22 per student per hour, regardless of CBL inclusion). Forty percent of the students expected that CBL would positively influence their study behavior, and 23% also anticipated a positive effect on examination scores. Student examination scores, however, were not affected by CBL. Almost half of the students (43%) were in favor of CBL inclusion in future computer-assisted learning modules, whereas 33% did not see merit in including CBL in CAFAs.ConclusionsIncorporation of CBL in a single formative assessment led to a slight increase in student-instructor interaction times, but had effect neither on the number of student-instructor interactions nor on exam scores. CBL inclusion positively influenced student's appreciation of the coursework, presumably by helping students to evaluate their mastery level and identify misconceptions. A more extensive enrollment of CBL beyond an individual formative assessment, throughout a course or a curriculum, may possibly reveal positive effects on study efficacy.

Dataset Information

A Modified CREATE Intervention Improves Student Cognitive and Affective Outcomes in an Upper-Division Genetics Course.

Publications

A Modified CREATE Intervention Improves Student Cognitive and Affective Outcomes in an Upper-Division Genetics Course.

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