The excessive "jargon" load in biology may be a hurdle for developing conceptual understanding as well as achieving core competencies such as scientific literacy and communication. Little work has been done to characterize student understanding of biology-specific jargon. To address this issue, we aimed to determine the types of biology…

Mastery of jargon terms is an important part of student learning in biology and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics domains. In two experiments, we investigated whether prelecture quizzes enhance memory for jargon terms, and whether that enhanced familiarity can facilitate learning of related concepts that are encountered…

In this experiment, students in a large undergraduate biology course were first exposed to the concepts without new technical vocabulary ("jargon") in a pre-class reading assignment. Their learning of the concepts and jargon was compared with that of an equivalent group of students in another section of the same course, whose pre-class…

When selecting a textbook, college instructors must weigh a variety of factors. One is whether the text is written at a level that is accessible to one's students. An important factor in this is how many technical words are used. I developed an index to calculate logodiversity, a term I coined that reflects the number of technical words and the…