Community college biology students' understanding of Vision and Change core concepts.

Abstract

The Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education report establishes a set of five core concepts that students should build an understanding of throughout college biology programs. While student conceptual understanding is well studied in 4-year contexts, there are minimal studies in community college contexts. Community colleges are unique: 38% of US college students are enrolled in them, many of whom identify as historically underrepresented in STEM. To better understand community college biology students' learning, we measured their understanding of the Vision and Change core concepts using the General Biology-Measuring Achievement and Progression in Science (GenBio-MAPS) assessment. By analyzing data from over 600 students attending nine different community colleges, we asked the following questions. (i) How do community college biology students perform across the five Vision and Change core concepts? (ii) Do institutional-, course-, and student-level variables contribute to variation in community college biology students' conceptual understanding? We found that students scored highest on Systems items and struggled the most with items about Information Flow. Furthermore, students generally scored lower on questions related to cellular and molecular biology and higher on questions related to ecology and evolution. While demographic factors explained minimal variance, we found that life science majors and students from dominant racial/gender identities scored significantly higher than those who did not identify similarly. We recommend areas for further research into community college biology students' conceptual understanding and implications for teaching practices that support their academic success.