Exploring how the decisions instructors make when crafting exams impact students Last week, our Evidence-Based Teaching Seminar series welcomed Christian Wright, PhD. Christian shared his research on assessments, and how instructors should be making careful decisions when writing exams. Faculty must consider a wide variety of areas when creating exams. Depending on their choices, they may be unknowingly causing students to drop out of biology programs. There were a number of questions faculty consider when building exams: The breadth and depth of the content- Do you cover less in order to deepen student learning in a specific area? Certain collaborative activities help students learn better, but the cost is that faculty may not be able to cover as much content The level of the content- Bloom's Taxonomy is often thought to move students from lower to higher cognitive levels. However, if a professor is asking a multiple choice question that requires students to memorize s...

Today's Guest Blogger is Christian Wright, an instructional professional in the School of Life Sciences as ASU. He has a Master’s in Education and a Ph.D. in Biology where he studied the interaction between physiological condition, environment, and foraging behavior of Gila monsters in Dr. Dale DeNardo’s lab in the School of Life Sciences at ASU. Additionally, he was a postdoctoral research scholar in Dr. Sara Brownel l ’s lab in the School of Life Sciences at ASU. His current research is a continuation and extension of research he worked on with Dr. Brownell in her lab and focuses specifically on 1) generating a validated general biology programmatic assessment, 2) exploring potential biases in undergraduate biology classrooms as well as examining mechanisms and interventions that may explain and alleviate said biases, 3) evaluating assessments used by undergraduate biology instructors and by biology education researchers to determine if these measurement tools are indeed...

Today's Guest Blogger is Christian Wright a postdoctoral research scholar in Dr. Sara Brownell’s Biology Education Research Lab in the School of Life Sciences as ASU. He has a Master’s in Education and a Ph.D. in Biology where he studied the interaction between physiological condition, environment, and foraging behavior of Gila monsters. His current research focuses on 1) generating a validated general biology programmatic assessment, 2) exploring potential biases in undergraduate biology classrooms as well as examining mechanisms and interventions that may explain and alleviate said biases, 3) evaluating assessments used by undergraduate biology instructors and by biology education researchers to determine if these measurement tools are indeed measuring what they intend to measure, and 4) exploring how and why instructional strategies differentially impact cohorts of students in undergraduate biology classrooms. He will be starting a position as an Academic Professional i...