DEVELOPMENT OF CDCI-SHINE, AN R-BASED WEB APPLICATION FOR THE ANALYSIS OF RESULTS FROM THE CENTRAL DOGMA CONCEPT INVENTORY (CDCI)

Poster from the Rochester Academy of Science Fall 2015 Scientific Papers Day held Saturday, November 7, 2015, whose abstracts were published on their website.

Abstract: 

We have recently developed and tested a 23-question assessment instrument designed to

evaluate student understanding of essential concepts of the Central Dogma of Molecular

Biology, called the Central Dogma Concept Inventory (CDCI). The CDCI instrument has been

rigorously tested with more than 1,700 undergraduate beta-testers. It uses a multiple-select

format in order to circumvent many of the problems common to a forced-choice tool (e.g.

students using test-taking strategies to correctly guess correct answers) and provide greater

insight into student thinking. However, analysis and scoring was labor intensive, complex, and

needed to be performed locally, which would not be practical if the tool were adopted widely. To

remedy this problem, we are developing a web-application to perform rigorous and varied

statistical analyses in R that do not rely on user knowledge of programming or computational

statistics. The web-application, CDCI-SHINE, will allow users to upload CDCI data and quickly

produce meaningful and easy-to-interpret figures of class performance. For example, instructors

could look at their class's performance on each concept in order to better tailor their coverage of

topics, or they could compare pre and post test results in order to evaluate the effect of a new

pedagogical intervention. In the future, the web-based CDCI-SHINE may be able to be applied

to other concept assessment instruments as well.