Molecular Concepts Adaptive Assessment (MCAA) Characterizes Undergraduate Misconceptions about Molecular Emergence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper discusses the results of two experiments assessing undergraduate students' beliefs about the random nature of molecular environments. Experiment 1 involved the implementation of a pilot adaptive assessment ( n = 773) and focus group discussions with undergraduate students enrolled in first- through third-year biology courses; experiment 2 involved the distribution of the redesigned adaptive assessment to the same population of students in three consecutive years ( n = 1170). The overarching goal of the study was to provide a detailed characterization of learners' perceptions and beliefs regarding molecular agency, environments, and diffusion and whether or not those beliefs change over time. Our results indicated that advanced learners hold as many misconceptions as novice learners and that confidence in their misconceptions increases as they advance through their undergraduate education. In particular, students' understanding of random/Brownian motion is complex and highly contextual, suggesting that the way in which we teach biology does not adequately remediate students' preconceived notions of molecular agency and may actually reinforce them.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".