1. Five Month Retention of Basic Genetics Knowledge Following an Introductory Biology Course Peter Busher and Andy Andres Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics College of General Studies

2. Background  Increasing importance of assessment  Common assessment is pretesting existing student knowledge  Sometimes followed by post course testing using same instrument

3. College of General Studies  Unique Team Structure  Students are with same Faculty Team for two semesters  Teach Intro Human Genetics in the Fall on CGS Teams X and Y  Required course for CGS students  Student are mostly non-science majors  Busher: Team X; Andres: Team Y  Fall 2011 decided to Pretest student knowledge in Genetics

4. What We Did  Sept. 2011 gave a pretest first day in class:  30 questions  Various conceptual, factual, et al., type questions covering some basic concepts in human genetics  Dec. 2011 repeated same 30 Qs on student’s final exam.  No students reported back to us they noticed they were the same Qs

5. What We Did  Guess what we found?  Shocking result: students improved…  We were interested in how students retained science knowledge  Due to cramming behavior observed in intro classes, our hypothesis was that students would not retain the knowledge gained during the fall course  Results convinced us it was worth doing more rigorously in Academic Year 2012-13

6. First Results (N = 15), Fall 2011-Spring 2012 32% 77% 61%

7. More Results, Fall 2012-Spring 2013  109 Students on Teams X and Y took the Sept. Pretest and Final Exam  This is the familiar pretest/post- test assessment 30% 70%

8. More Results, Fall 2012-Spring 2013  69 Students on Teams X and Y took the Pretest, Final, and May Post-test  By Repeated Measures ANOVA all scores are significantly different (P < 0.0001) from each other 28% 70% 52%

9. Results: Real Data Stories  Top and bottom pretest scorer improve and retain similarly  Performed well on Final Exam, little retention  Not much change, good retention  Some students improved five months later!

10. What Does it Mean?  We think retention of knowledge is an important component of assessment  Introductory Genetics students retain genetics knowledge after five months of studying the material