Abstract:

The ultimate goal of biology education is to develop the biological literacy of students, including not only biological content knowledge but in particular the conceptual understanding of biological processes. The conceptual understanding of biological core concepts in the current study is determined as the students’ understanding of the core concepts of biology that enables the students to understand the biological concepts and apply this knowledge to their thinking. Conceptual understanding is needed in all cases, where students need to give answers to different tasks e.g. need to think critically and creatively solving complex problems. Although assessment is a very important component of the education, there are few studies investigating the assessment of students’ conceptual understanding of core concepts of biology. The aim of this study was to assess 215 (162 females and 53 males) 12th grade students’ biological knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation skills considering the Bloom’s taxonomy.

In this research the core concepts of biology were used as the basis of composing the biology multiple choice test. The questions were created within seven core concepts (molecules and structures, metabolism, cells, heredity, evolution, ecology, human anatomy and physiology) The upper secondary school graduate students undertook the paper-and-pencil test in July 2019. The biology test consisted of 50 multiple-choice questions and the accordance with the biology curriculum and its specified learning outcomes was validated by three biology education experts. Multiple choice questions test (MCQs) are frequently used to assess students’ knowledge in the field of medical and other life sciences (Ahmed, 2020) as an objective and reliable tool for evaluating learning performance of students (Ingale et al., 2017). Properly constructed MCQs enable to assess the students’ higher cognitive processing of Bloom’s Taxonomy such as interpretation, synthesis and application of knowledge, instead of just testing recalling of isolated facts (Carneson, et al., 2011).

The created MCQs biology test followed the criteria that the questions had to meet:
(1) assessing all core concepts of biology;
(2) measuring all levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy thinking skills;
(3) reliability,
(4) validity, and
(5) ease of scoring.

The created and piloted test before conducting it at school, was effective in assessing and distinguishing the students’ achievement at all levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. The well-designed multiple-choice question test of biology incorporating the biological core concepts and different levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy was proved to be a potential method of assessing the students’ thinking skills and conceptual understanding. We can conclude that all the items of MCQ-s biology test were good as the indexes of item difficulty varied between 0.20–0.63, showing that the test items were at the optimum difficulty level for discrimination between high, medium and low achievers and not being too difficult or too easy for participants.

The 12th grade students’ test results were in line with Bloom’s Taxonomy and showed that the easiest tasks for students included recalling of biological knowledge (the percentage of correct answers 66.7) and the most difficult tasks measured students’ evaluation skills in the context of biology (the percentage of correct answers 29.5).

Keywords:

Biological core concepts, conceptual understanding, empirical research, upper secondary school, evaluation of competences.