The Conclusion Assessment Rubric (CAR): A Tool to Evaluate Students’ Ability to Make Context-Driven Claims with Appropriate Scope from Experimental Biological Evidence

Few tools exist to thoroughly assess undergraduate students’ ability to generate evidence-based conclusions from research inquiries, a higher-order reasoning skill aligned with the Vision & Change Process of Science core competency. To fill this gap, we created the Conclusion Assessment Rubric (CAR), building on the experimentation competency framework developed by biology educators and literature on scientific argumentation. The CAR is a comprehensive evaluation of students’ achievement of learning outcomes, integrating key aspects of knowledge building in biology. The CAR had an intraclass coefficient of 0.7 ( k = 3) with raters representing a spectrum of educator experience. Papers written in the first and third semester of a three-semester process of science curriculum were evaluated; the capstone papers earned significantly higher scores (12.9 ± 2.7 compared with 9.6 ± 2.5; t 15 = 2.53, p = 0.023), indicating that the CAR can differentiate experienced from novice learner performance in generating conclusions. We provide example student excerpts with aligned CAR scoring to demonstrate how the rubric was applied to student writing. To our knowledge, the CAR is the first tool that assesses a student's ability to generate conclusions that inform a biological rationale model within the scope of limitations inherent to the methodologies of the investigation.