Community‐based design and national testing of an assessment tool to measure student understanding of enzyme kinetics in undergraduate biochemistry

Most biochemists would agree that students should understand the fundamentals of enzyme kinetics and inhibition by the end of an introductory undergraduate biochemistry course. Assessment instruments can be used to determine whether students understand this important concept at the end of a course and can help guide changes in instruction to improve student learning in this area. As part of an NSF‐funded project to test and disseminate active learning materials for biochemistry on the national level, we designed a multi‐part question to test student understanding of enzyme kinetics through application of the concepts in a new context. The new context, a saturable binding event, was used in order to ensure that students demonstrated meaningful understanding of key concepts rather than memorization. A community of over thirty expert biochemistry instructors from a variety of institutions participated in choosing the question topic, developing and revising the question and designing a grading rubric. The question consists of eight parts, three of which allow for student free response. The experts agreed that five of the eight question parts assessed skills in the higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy including analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Results from use of the instrument at several institutions nationwide will be reported.