BioSkills Guide: Development and National Validation of a Tool for Interpreting the Vision and Change Core Competencies

Abstract

To excel in modern science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers, biology majors need a range of transferable skills, yet competency development is often a relatively underdeveloped facet of the undergraduate curriculum. We have elaborated the Vision and Change core competency framework into a resource called the BioSkills Guide, a set of measurable learning outcomes that can be more readily implemented by faculty. Following an iterative review process including more than 200 educators, we gathered evidence of the BioSkills Guide's content validity using a national survey of more than 400 educators. Rates of respondent support were high (74.3-99.6%) across the 77 outcomes in the final draft. Our national sample during the development and validation phases included college biology educators representing more than 250 institutions, including 73 community colleges, and a range of course levels and biology subdisciplines. Comparison of the BioSkills Guide with other science competency frameworks reveals significant overlap but some gaps and ambiguities. These differences may reflect areas where understandings of competencies are still evolving in the undergraduate biology community, warranting future research. We envision the BioSkills Guide supporting a variety of applications in undergraduate biology, including backward design of individual lessons and courses, competency assessment development, and curriculum mapping and planning.

FIGURE 1.

BioSkills Guide methods overview. Initial drafting included all work to generate BioSkills Guide version I. Five rounds of review and revision were carried out on versions I–V (RQ1a). Pilot validation evaluated version VI (RQ1b). National validation evaluated final version of BioSkills Guide (RQ1b).

FIGURE 2.

BioSkills Guide development and validation participants spanned a range of institution types, expertise, and geographic locations. (A) Self-reported demographics of validation phase survey respondents (n = 417). Current engagement in disciplinary biology research was inferred from field of current research. Experience in DBER was inferred from fields of current research and graduate training. (B) Geographic distribution of participants from 263 unique institutions, representing 556 participants with known institutions. Size is proportional to the number of participants from that institution. Only institutions in the continental United States and British Columbia are shown. Additional participants came from Alaska, Alberta, Hawaii, India, Puerto Rico, and Scotland (eight institutions). (C) Geographic distribution of participants from community colleges and MSIs: 73 unique community colleges and 49 unique MSIs (46 shown; not shown are MSIs in Alaska and Puerto Rico); 23 institutions were classified as both community colleges and MSIs.

FIGURE 3.

Learning outcome ratings show increasing consensus over iterative rounds of revision. Survey ratings were summarized by calculating the percent of respondents who selected “important” or “very important” for each outcome (i.e., percent support). Ratings from pilot and national validation surveys were combined as “validation” (RQ1b). Each circle represents a single learning outcome. Horizontal lines indicate means across all outcomes from that survey. Points are jittered to reveal distribution. These data are represented in tabular form in Table 3.

FIGURE 4.

Competency and respondent demographics have significant but small effects on learning outcome support. Predicted probabilities of a respondent supporting (i.e., rating “important” or “very important”) a learning outcome in the indicated competency for (A) all respondents (RQ2a) or (B) respondents in various demographic groups (RQ2b). Predicted probabilities were calculated using best-fitting models for each research question. Vertical lines represent 95% confidence intervals. Note that y-axis has been truncated.

FIGURE 5.

The BioSkills Guide can support a range of curricular scales.