Cultivating Enduring Changes in Assessment Through a Life Sciences Community of Practice

ABSTRACT

To provide instructors with personally relevant, discipline‐based training in assessment, the Community for the Assessment of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Learning (CABL) conducted a series of six participant‐centered workshops between July 2020 and January 2024. Key features of the workshops included emphasizing backward design, peer editing, and the use of participant‐generated questions and rubrics as teaching tools. Five of the workshops focused on summative assessment and one on alternative assessment, with half offered virtually and the latter half delivered in person. In total, 110 unique scientist‐educators participated. To investigate how effective these CABL workshops were in fostering changes in assessment attitudes and practices, attendees completed an Exit Survey at the end of each workshop and responded to a single Follow‐Up Survey administered in the spring of 2024. Six of the 48 respondents to the Follow‐Up Survey participated in Focus Groups. Exit Survey responses indicated a high degree of satisfaction with the structure and content of the workshops and their immediate positive impact on knowledge about assessment. The Follow‐Up Survey revealed lasting impacts: Sixty percent of respondents reported revising their overall approach to assessment, while nearly a third described specific actions they had taken to implement inclusive teaching practices. Focus Group participants noted that transformative change could occur through both adopting best practices and disseminating knowledge to their professional networks. Together, these findings suggest that the participant‐centered CABL workshops catalyzed changes in assessment perspectives and self‐reported practices among a substantive portion of attendees.