Helping Students Become Better Graphers
Graphs are one of the primary tools scientists use to communicate data, making graphing skills a key component of biology education. While poor graphing in undergraduate biology classes is a common complaint from instructors, there has never been a good way to pinpoint what aspects of graphing are difficult, especially in large classes…until now.
Identifying the trouble spots…
SimBio’s current research, funded by two NSF grants (“Grappling with Graphs”), examines the graphing skills of biology undergraduates. In a long running collaboration with Dr. Stephanie Gardner at Purdue University, Dr. Joel Abraham at California State University, Fullerton, and others, we’re developing tools to assess student competence with graphs. The results of our research help us design graphing tutorials that make it easier to teach and learn graphing.
In a recent webinar entitled From Thought to Plot, Dr. Gardner spoke about the work of her own team, and our collaborative team, on graphing. The summary won’t surprise anyone – undergraduate biology students make a lot of predictable mistakes compared to more experienced graphers. Being aware of those mistakes helps instructors better target their teaching. For instance, we know that students struggle to choose the right variables to graph, as well as picking the right type of graph to use for a particular data set. Knowing this, we can identify patterns from how students get those steps wrong and actively work to preclude them.
…to build an assessment tool for instructors.
Our next step is to help instructors make these observations, whether of a student, class, or across the whole undergraduate biology population. In “Grappling with Graphs”, we identified a set of practices that lead to high graphing competence with biological data. We are building an auto-scored assessment tool based on these practices that can be used with a large number of students. From that data, we hope to paint a better picture of where students need help with their graphing and, in turn, help SimBio build evidence-based materials to better teach graph construction. We are confident this approach works – it is similar to the grant-funded process that resulted in our highly effective Understanding Experimental Design tutorial, now used by hundreds of thousands of students.
Further reading:
- Gardner, S.M., Suazo-Flores, E., Maruca, S., Abraham J.K., Karippadath, A., Meir, E. 2021. Biology Undergraduate Students’ Graphing Practice in Digital Versus Pen and Paper Graphing Environments. J Sci Educ Technol
The first publication from a large multi-institution effort to develop performance-based assessments of graphing ability among biology students, this paper compares the results from the SimBio-written digital graphing assessment to a pen and paper assessment.
This material is based upon work partially supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1726180 and 2111150. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
