T11: Revealing undergraduate biology students’ conceptions of variability within graphing

Information

Descriptive statistics including variability fall under the scope of quantitative reasoning within biology curriculum, however research focused on how students interpret and understand variability in a biological context at the undergraduate level is limited. Within a biological context, we are interested in how undergraduate students interpret variability using a variety of graphs. We developed a performance-based graphing assessment containing six biological scenarios, in which students test predictions through graphing. The assessment contains questions targeting how students interpret variability. Over 3,500 students from introductory and upper-level biology courses across multiple institution types have taken our assessment as an assignment. We employed deductive and inductive thematic coding of student responses describing error bars. We conducted analysis on a closed-response question to describe the extent of students' understanding of variability. We compared student graph construction with variability answers to look for patterns between how students construct their graphs and their understanding of variability. In aggregate, roughly 30% of students recognized the absence of variability in a bar graph. We show trends in how bar graph construction from raw data to graphing means to means with error bars suggests a potential greater student understanding of variability.