Short answer questions are currently ubiquitous in UK secondary biology education. They work well for providing objectivity. This gives them the current status as the go-to resource for summative—final grade—testing, typically as standardised GCSE-style exam questions.
But there are trade-offs; the short-answer nature gives benefits, but also constraints:
They fragment knowledge and so perform poorly at show interconnected thinking.
They can often make it difficult for the teacher to distinguish between verbatim memorisation and understanding.
The problem we have is that these questions are looking to see if students can give the same answer to the same question (Marton, 2014). This might work for summative assessment, but is constraining as formative assessment, because it’s either right, or not right enough.
And so, it constrains our ability to give feedback, because in many cases you’re stuck with ‘you have to know that this is the answer to this question’. I would argue that the ‘extended response questions’ in current biology GCSEs (just 6-marks) also assess if students can recall the same content in the same way.
This is why Question Level Analysis of exam-style questions in science fails to be of much use.
Short answer questions can be answered poorly if the student didn’t write exactly what the mark scheme requires yet they may have some understanding of the concept. While a student with good verbatim recall and good exam technique may get more marks, despite having worse conceptual understanding. And, from the short answers they give, you couldn’t tell who is who with certainty.
So for summative assessment, short answer questions have their place, but what about for formative assessment? Don't worry, I'm not going to throw the baby out with the water. I use exam-style questions with my students doing an exam course because some are really nice questions, students do need practice in exam courses, and they do give us some data for formative assessment.
But for formative assessment to really work well, we need a rounder view from different perspectives, and that means reducing the general dependence on exam questions. How do we get those other perspectives?
Basically, it’s more useful to see how students think differently about the same concept. With open questions and extended responses we can get this data.
In my book I present a taxonomy of understanding biological systems, which can be used to see what our students understand. As it categorises the answers you typically find in biology classrooms.
You just ask them 'What if?'—offering an easy solution to forming rich questions. And as every question is both novel and open, it allows us to see what students can actually do with what they have learnt. Pairing 'What if?' questions with the taxonomy of understanding creates several opportunities:
They allow teachers to see how students think differently about the same concept, and therefore provide a different type of feedback on our teaching and curriculum.
The taxonomy provides students with an idea of what good thinking looks like in our subject (and, thus, how to improve) beyond simply answering short-answer questions correctly. It provides an alternative to focusing on a simple grade. As such, they provide tools for students for metacognition and self-regulation.
The answers provide teachers with something meaningful to mark and provide feedback on that goes beyond 'you need to learn this', or 'you just need to know this'. It also frees us from the marking of class books, which are often just sketch pads for thinking during lessons. I’ll get back to the issue of marking and workload in a minute.
It could give lower-secondary biology more independence from the standardised-exam-style questions of upper-secondary, and thus allow it to be less constrained by standardised-exam content, and exam-course thinking. As gene-flow decreases between two populations they become freer to diverge and adapt to their own circumstances, the same can be said of decreasing question-flow between upper and lower secondary biology.
Question format: What would happen if X?
Examples:
What would happen if a person developed less capillary density around the intestines than normal?
What would happen if pesticides prevented decomposers living in the soil of the habitat.
What would happen if there were a hole in the septum between the ventricles.
What would happen if one lung was completely removed from a human.
What would happen if a leaf was twice as thick as usual (from top to bottom).
What would happen if a species lost the ability to carry our crossing over on one half of their chromosome 1.
There are two ways in which we can observe the different ways students think about the same concept. Firstly, their answers can be categorised in the four quadrants of the taxonomy. Secondly, we'll see different priorities in what students consider most important to mention & discuss in their answer.
To make 'What if?' questions, just think about the system you've been teaching, and then change one part of it. For example:
You could turn it upside down—What if the leaves of a plant develop upside down?
You could stop it moving—What would happen in breathing if the rib cage were fused so it couldn't move?
You could add another—What if a third centrosome appeared in the cell during mitosis?
You could change its orientation—What if the collecting duct were perpendicular to the loop of Henle rather than parallel?
You could remove it—What if someone's gallbladder were removed and bile was secreted continuously?
Short-answer Vs open & novel 'What if?' questions
My courses often contain short-answer questionsz. Here's an example of—what I call—basic knowledge questions (I share them freely here). They are useful in biology courses as they concisely define the minimum details.
The trouble with short answer questions dominating a course is that they are unbridled and their effects unpredictable—likely instilling a conception of learning based on verbatim recall alone. (See this blog post). You know it or you don't. You just have to remember the answers. But if you're lucky some students may instinctively search for understanding alone. Who knows?
Their successful implementation depends on the oversight and guiding-hand of frameworks that direct the learning of unwieldy vocabulary towards a greater goal—creating a culture of meaning making and seeking ways of what Marton (2014) calls 'seeing with knowledge'.
For example, students have been shown to go through hierarchical and inclusive phases of their conception of explanation in science. In one study, Metz (1991) found that it began with the conception of 'function of the object as explanation', which then advanced to 'connections as explanation', and culminating with 'mechanism as explanation'.
The taxonomy explicitly encourages students to shift their conceptions towards mechanistic reasoning of parts and wholes. This is important because student conceptions of learning will influence what they experience and see in their teacher's explanations.
Won't it lead to more marking?
Not necessarily. If we use more qualitative marking, using our expert intuition and knowledge of both our students' and our curriculum, then it could be quick and not burdensome. Remember it's less about getting numbers and more about understanding what our students are learning and how they are thinking.
Here are some ideas:
Students should have a restricted writing space and a time limit.
'Marking' should be a qualitative feeling using expert intuition
A sample can be taken from a class from which important points to address can be discussed in whole class feedback.
Examples can be chosen in the classroom (by looking over shoulders) and 'live-marked' using a visualiser and projecting answers for students to see. This is what I do the most.
Do you want to see exactly how I embed what-if questions in my teaching and formative assessments? Learn how in my books with many concrete examples from my classes and students' work. Download the first chapters of each book here.
Bibliography
Kinchin, I., 2016. Visualising powerful knowledge to develop the expert student. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Marton, F., and Booth, S. 1997. Learning and Awareness. New York: Routledge.
Marton, F. 2014. Necessary Conditions of Learning. London: Routledge.
McTighe, J., and Curtis, G. (2019) Leading Modern Learning: A Blueprint for Vision-Driven Schools. 2nd Edition, Bloomington, Indiana: Solution Tree Press.
Moore-Anderson, C. 2021. “Designing a Curriculum for the Networked Knowledge Facet of Systems Thinking in Secondary Biology Courses: A Pragmatic Framework.” Journal of Biological Education.
Moore-Anderson, C. 2021. “Putting nature back into secondary biology education: A framework for integration.” Journal of Biological Education.
Novak, J. D. 2010. Learning, Creating, and Using Knowledge: Concept Maps as Facilitative Tools in Schools and Corporations. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
Russ, R., Scherr, R., Hammer, D., and Mikeska, J., 2008. “Recognizing Mechanistic Reasoning in Student Scientific Inquiry: A Framework for Discourse Analysis Developed From Philosophy of Science”. Science Education. 92 (3): 499-525.
Trigwell, K., and Prosser, M. 2020. Exploring University Teaching and Learning: Experience and Context. Switzerland: Springer Nature.
References
Metz, K. E. (1991). Development of explanation: Incremental and fundamental change in children’s physics knowledge. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 28(9), 785 – 797.