Premium
Assessing Student Competencies Using Rubrics Associated with Figure Legends and Ability to Perform the Bradford Assay in a 400‐level Undergraduate Course on Proteomics
Author(s) -
Shipman Richard,
Grant Jennifer
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.31.1_supplement.752.3
Subject(s) - rubric , mathematics education , competence (human resources) , coursework , psychology , medical education , medicine , social psychology
The University of Wisconsin Stout is the polytechnic of the UW‐System. Aligned with our core values, Proteomics (BIO‐425) is a 3‐credit lecture and laboratory course that emphasizes the use of hands‐on techniques, particularly microchromatographic and protein digestion strategies. In addition to learning techniques like in‐gel digestion of proteins and protein chemistry techniques, students also developed and tested their own protein purification strategy in a mini‐project format. At the heart of this course, assessments revolve around completion of laboratory reports that follow the Abstract/Introduction/Methods/Results/Discussion (AIMRD) commonly followed by scientific articles. One focus of our semester‐long course was to instruct students in the performance of the Bradford protein assay at the level of a professional in the field. R 2 values for their standard curves, made using bovine serum albumin serial dilutions, were tracked over the semester. Data on student success with the Bradford assay, and particularly measures of student progress over the course of the semester, were evaluated. Time to competence appears to be the most effective measure of student success. On average it required three attempts for students to gain proficiency at the Bradford assay. A second measure of student success is the time to proficiency in creating graphs within lab reports. Here we report the rubric used to evaluate graphs submitted by students, which measures appropriateness of axis labels, titles, and figure legends. While development of this rubric is ongoing, the present version provides insight into the intellectual development of the students taking this course. In all, this presentation provides useful measures of student success that focus on data that can be harvested from lab reports submitted by the students. The authors are actively soliciting feedback on statistical measures that can be utilized to quantify learning outcomes in both formative and summative arenas.