As course-based research experiences become increasingly common, there is a growing need for assessment
tools that can measure students’ research skills regardless of the specific research project content or
techniques. A key difference between novices and experts is in how they organize information; this difference
can be used to measure relative expertise in an area via card sorting tasks where participants are asked to sort
scenarios into logical groups. Experts tend to sort scenarios based on similarities that are deep and meaningful
to field while novices tend to sort scenarios based on more superficial similarities. We designed a card sorting
task of research scenarios and hypothesized that experts would sort scenarios based on fundamental research
approach while novices may sort more on superficial characteristics such as model organism or person
conducting the research. We administered our task to introductory undergraduate students (presumed
research novices); faculty and postdocs (presumed research experts); and graduate students (presumed
developing experts) and found that we did detect a difference between expert, developing expert, and novice
card sorts that matched our hypothesis. We propose that this tool can be used in a variety of lab courses to
easily assess expert-like thinking in students.
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