Five Month Retention of Basic Genetics Knowledge Following an Introductory Biology Course

Peter Busher and Andy Andres Division of Natural Sciences and MathematicsCollege of General Studies

Background Increasing importance of

assessment

Common assessment is pretesting existing student knowledge

Sometimes followed by post course testing using same instrument

College of General StudiesUnique Team Structure

Students are with same Faculty Team for two semesters

Teach Intro Human Genetics in the Fall on CGS Teams X and Y

Required course for CGS students

Student are mostly non-science majors

Busher: Team X; Andres: Team Y

Fall 2011 decided to Pretest student knowledge in Genetics

What We DidSept. 2011 gave a pretest

first day in class: 30 questions Various conceptual, factual, et

al., type questions covering some basic concepts in human genetics

Dec. 2011 repeated same 30 Qs on student’s final exam.

No students reported back to us they noticed they were the same Qs

What We Did Guess what we found?

Shocking result: students improved…

We were interested in how students retained science knowledge

Due to cramming behavior observed in intro classes, our hypothesis was that students would not retain the knowledge gained during the fall course

Results convinced us it was worth doing more rigorously in Academic Year 2012-13

First Results (N = 15), Fall 2011-Spring 2012

32% 77% 61%

More Results, Fall 2012-Spring 2013109 Students

on Teams X and Y took the Sept. Pretest and Final Exam

This is the familiar pretest/post-test assessment

30% 70%

More Results, Fall 2012-Spring 2013

69 Students on Teams X and Y took the Pretest, Final, and May Post-test

By Repeated Measures ANOVA all scores are significantly different (P < 0.0001) from each other

28% 70% 52%

Results: Real Data StoriesTop and bottom pretest

scorer improve and retain similarly

Performed well on Final Exam, little retention

Not much change, good retention

Some students improved five months later!

What Does it Mean?We think retention of

knowledge is an important component of assessment

Introductory Genetics students retain genetics knowledge after five months of studying the material