Investigating misconceptions in biology held by Swiss students at the threshold between Gymnasium and University

Biology education has been moving away from learning large numbers of facts to the understanding of underlying concepts. Various reports describe important misconceptions of basic ideas in biology by a majority of students. Effective learning requires the identification and subsequent change of these misconceptions. To identify frequent misconceptions, tools such as concept inventories are employed. These concept inventories are based on the analysis of student’s thinking and the explanation of their views of scientific concepts. For our project we intend to use the Biological Concepts Instrument (BCI), a multiple-choice tool to test the conceptual understanding of biology of students before the maturity exam and of undergraduates. The objective is to gain a better knowledge of the misconceptions held by students that interfere with their learning of new concepts in biology. The inventory of misconceptions will help lecturers to identify the learning needs of students when they start their introductory biology course at university and readjust undergraduate teaching if necessary.

• The Biological Concepts Instrument (BCI) (Klymkowsky et al. 2010), a multiple-choice questionnaire, provides insights into students misconceptions on diverse topics such as genetics, evolution, structure and function of molecules, energetic properties and experimental design.
• The BCI was developed based on the biological thinking of students and their naive views of scientific concepts.
• Awareness of these prevalent and persistent misconceptions may help teachers and lecturers to adapt their teaching methods and curricular emphasis to improve understanding of these processes.
References:
Klymkowsky, M.W., Underwood, S.M. & Garvin-Doxas, K., 2010. Biological Concepts Instrument (BCI): A diagnostic tool for revealing student thinking. arXiv.org.

The pre- and post-test approach at the threshold between Gymnasium and University was used to diagnose students’ progress of understanding on a given topic and to measure the efficiency of the biology introductory courses curriculum at university.

It would be interesting to deepen students’ biological thinking by interviewing them.

• Students were curious to know how they have performed on the BCI and wanted to be informed about their misconceptions.
• Gymnasium students and first-year undergraduates found that some questions of the BCI were quite hard. However, their attractiveness to common misconceptions revealed some problematic understanding.

• BCI questions can be used as warm-up questions (clicker questions) to explore students’ prior understanding before teaching
• Ask students to explain their thinking (orally or by writing) about a given biological process