A Modified CREATE Intervention Improves Student Cognitive and Affective Outcomes in an Upper-Division Genetics Course

Abstract

Many national reports have called for undergraduate biology education to incorporate research and analytical thinking into the curriculum. In response, interventions have been developed and tested. CREATE (Consider, Read, Elucidate the hypotheses, Analyze and interpret the data, and Think of the next Experiment) is an instructional strategy designed to engage students in learning core concepts and competencies through careful reading of primary literature in a scaffolded fashion. CREATE has been successfully implemented by many instructors across diverse institutional contexts and has been shown to help students develop in the affective, cognitive, and epistemological domains, consistent with broader meta-analyses demonstrating the effectiveness of active learning. Nonetheless, some studies on CREATE have reported discrepant results, raising important questions on effectiveness in relation to the fidelity and integrity of implementation. Here, we describe an upper-division genetics course that incorporates a modified version of CREATE. Similar to the original CREATE instructional strategy, our intervention's design was based on existing learning principles. Using existing concept inventories and validated survey instruments, we found that our modified CREATE intervention promotes higher affective and cognitive gains in students in contrast to three comparison groups. We also found that students tended to underpredict their learning and performance in the modified CREATE intervention, while students in some comparison groups had the opposite trend. Together, our results contribute to the expanding literature on how and why different implementations of the same active-learning strategy contribute to student outcomes.

FIGURE 1

Implementation of the modified CREATE intervention. Annotated DART profiles for: A) a CREATE-only class, B) an interactive clicker lecture, and C) a mixed class with both CREATE and clicker questions. CQ = clicker question; DART = Decibel Analysis for Research in Teaching.

FIGURE 2

Cognitive outcomes. (A) Pre- and post-course CI scores are plotted on the left y-axis and students’ perceived learning on the right y-axis. Two-way ANOVA indicates that the perceived learning score in CREATE was lower than the three comparison courses (p at least < 0.01), whereas the comparison courses were not statistically different among themselves. For CI scores, error bars indicate standard deviation; effect sizes (ES) are calculated by Cohen’s d, and p values are determined by two-way ANOVA. (B) Pre- and post-course TOSLS scores for the modified CREATE intervention are compared by t-test (p < 0.001). Error bars indicate standard deviation, and ES is calculated by Cohen’s d. (C) Distributions of students’ actual and perceived grades (legend: A, B, C, D, and F) are plotted as outer and inner rings respectively in the donut graphs and compared using Fisher’s exact test. CI = concept inventory items.

FIGURE 3

Affective outcomes. Results on the six affective dimensions from our survey are plotted: (A) personal relevance, (B) uncertainty of science, (C) critical voice, (D) shared control, (E) peer negotiation, and (F) affective support. Error bars indicate standard deviation, and statistical differences (by two-way ANOVA) are indicated by brackets and the following notation: * p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01; *** p < 0.001; **** p < 0.0001.