How Administration Stakes and Settings Affect Student Behavior and Performance on a Biology Concept Assessment

Biology instructors use concept assessments in their courses to gauge student under-standing of important disciplinary ideas. Instructors can choose to administer concept as-sessments based on participation (i.e., lower stakes) or the correctness of responses (i.e., higher stakes), and students can complete the assessment in an in-class or out-of-class setting. Different administration conditions may affect how students engage with and perform on concept assessments, thus influencing how instructors should interpret the resulting scores. Building on a validity framework, we collected data from 1578 under-graduate students over 5 years under five different administration conditions. We did not find significant differences in scores between lower-stakes in-class, higher-stakes in-class, and lower-stakes out-of-class conditions, indicating a degree of equivalence among these three options. We found that students were likely to spend more time and have higher scores in the higher-stakes out-of-class condition. However, we suggest that instructors cautiously interpret scores from this condition, as it may be associated with an increased use of external resources. Taken together, we highlight the lower-stakes out-of-class con-dition as a widely applicable option that produces outcomes similar to in-class conditions, while respecting the common desire to preserve classroom instructional time.

Automated summary

Biology instructors use concept assessments to measure student understanding in their courses. Different administration conditions, such as in-class or out-of-class settings, can affect student engagement and performance. This study found no significant differences in scores between lower and higher stakes in-class conditions, as well as lower stakes out-of-class conditions. However, caution should be taken when interpreting scores from higher stakes out-of-class conditions due to potential external resource use.