Maryland Biology Expectations Survey (MBEX) for characterizing student epistemology in biology courses

Abstract

The Maryland Biology Expectations Survey (MBEX) is a pre-post survey instrument that was designed by Hall (2013) to evaluate the changes of student epistemology occurring in an introductory biology course (Cooke et al., 2023). The MBEX addresses four epistemic themes: principles vs. facts, independence vs. authority, interdisciplinary reasoning vs. siloed thinking, and connection (= relevance) vs. isolation (Hall, 2013). The major difference between MBEX-1 statements and MBEX-2 statements resides in the interdisciplinary reasoning cluster. MBEX-1 incorporates more chemistry-related statements, whereas MBEX-2 focuses almost exclusively on math and physics. It turns out that biology students showed very favorable attitudes toward chemistry in their pre-course MBEX-1 responses, which reduced the ability of that survey to reveal any post-course changes in student attitudes toward interdisciplinary reasoning.

This website includes the following files: • MBEX-1 survey • MBEX-2 survey • Cluster assignments, polarization, and correspondence of MBEX-1 and MBEX-2 statements.

For further information, email either Kyriaki Chatzikyriakidou (kchatzikyriak@gmail.com) or Todd Cooke (tjcooke@umd.edu).

References

Cooke, T. J., Jensen, J. S., Carleton, K. L., Hall, K. L., Jardine, H. E., Kent, B. W., Redish, E.F., and Shultz, J. W. (2023). Group active engagements for facilitating principles-based learning in introductory organismal biology. American Biology Teacher 85 (6): 317–326. https://doi.org/10.1525/abt.2023.85.6.317

Hall, K. L. (2013). Examining the effects of students’ classroom expectations on undergraduate biology course reform. Ph.D. Dissertation in Digital Resources at the University of Maryland. https://drum.lib.umd.edu/items/91d250d1-0890-4adc-a040-6b9c9b5eff40