Evaluation of Students' Conceptual Organization of Neuroscience May Depend on the Expert Referent

The Structural Assessment of Knowledge (SAK) is an implicit form of evaluation, which examines the organization of knowledge structures or networks. The current study investigates variability in expert knowledge structures of neuroscience concepts, and whether different expert referents affect undergraduate students' learning of neuronal physiology and structure and function relationships across different course levels. Experts and students made pairwise ratings of terms on their relatedness. Students completed the ratings before and after learning in the classroom. Using Pathfinder software, students' networks were compared to three expert networks: their individual professor, an average of neuroscience professors at their institution, and an average of neuroscience professors in the field across multiple institutions. Neuroscience experts had large variability in the number of links in their networks. Furthermore, an exploratory analysis suggests experts' training may differentiate knowledge structures for some concepts. For student knowledge structures, the type of expert referent interacted with the type of class for neuronal physiology, but not structure and function relationships. More specifically, for neuronal physiology, advanced students were more similar to their professor than professors at their institution or professors in the field, but introductory students' similarity did not vary by expert referent. These findings highlight the role factors such as type of class, type of expert referent, and type of knowledge may play in comparisons using SAK. These issues may be more complex in interdisciplinary fields like neuroscience.