Dr. Juli Uhl, from the AACR group, presented at a webinar hosted by SimBio about her recent study: Automated Writing Assessment of Undergraduate Learning After Completion of Cellular Respiration Explored. This webinar highlighted a recently published, collaborative study in CBE-Life Sciences Education focused on student learning after completing a SimBio developed module.

The webinar was held Thursday, November 18th.  Watch the recording here: https://vimeo.com/simbio/aacr-research.

Constructed response (CR) questions challenge students to explain phenomena in their own words. This can reveal a lot about how students think and learn, but their answers can be challenging to assess. We incorporated CR questions into SimBio’s computer-based tutorial, Cellular Respiration Explored, and analyzed student responses using an automated classifier tool. We examined whether students from different institution types (community colleges, undergraduate-focused institutions, and research universities) varied in their explanations of cellular respiration and in how much they learned from the tutorial. After sharing our results, we’ll show how others can use our automated tools to analyze CR questions in their own classes.