Assessment of Evidentiary Reasoning in Undergraduate Biology: A Lit Review and Application of the Conceptual Analysis of Disciplinary Evidence (CADE) Framework

Knowledge of concepts and development of the competence to use that knowledge are foundational for students learning biology as a disciplinary research practice. One disciplinary research practice is to reason about the use and application of evidence. Therefore, there is a need to monitor students’ development of competence to reason with and about evidence in the context of biology investigations. To explore assessment tools and identify assessment gaps, here we introduce the Conceptual Analysis of Disciplinary Evidence (CADE) framework, which deconstructs evidence into a series of scientific research practice relationships with both domain-general and discipline-specific aspects. According to the CADE, theoretical knowledge from the discipline is key to informing what evidence is relevant, disciplinary practical knowledge is applied to get data for use as evidence, and evidence is interpreted in terms of what is known to refute, confirm, or advance knowledge. By categorizing various established assessments aligned to the CADE, we show that most assessments fail to link disciplinary knowledge with epistemic reasoning, when assessing how a hypothesis or research goal was informed, whether alternative models were considered, or whether claims were evaluated in terms of convergent evidence. To address these gaps, and to extend our study beyond experimentation, two assessments were designed to identify difficulties that students have in reasoning about evidence in the context of evolutionary tree-thinking. The examples give insight into assessment instrument choices and the design of new tools to reveal students’ difficulties with evidentiary reasoning in biology.