UC San Diego

Biology frequently describes many abstract phenomena such as, but not limited to, DNA replication in the cell growth cycle, proton transportation in the energy production process, and ligand activation in the immune response system. Instructors often communicate such complex phenomena through symbolic representation. Students’ performance on exams and research papers limitedly gauge their understanding of the concepts. For example, it is uncommon for instructors to have time or opportunity to examine how well students understand some of the essential aspects of biology representations. Since the student population in the university system is becoming more diverse, we wanted to examine the relationship between English familiarity and interpreting one of the most common symbols used in biology textbooks, arrows. Through surveying 1969 students in multiple introductory biology courses, we evaluate the preciseness and consistency of students’ understanding of various types of arrows in the biological context. In our findings, English proficiency is correlated with students’ decisions when decoding the meaning of an arrow. In our exploratory research on the possible relationship between the visual representation and written description of arrows in biology, there exists enormous variation in understanding the meaning of arrows among all students, regardless of language status. We suggest the instructors in the biological field restate and enforce the specific and consistent usage of symbols.