Student understanding regarding topics in upper-division courses, such as biochemistry, is not well represented in the literature. Herein we describe a study that investigated students' reasoning about Michaelis-Menten enzyme kinetics and enzyme inhibition. Our qualitative study involved semistructured interviews with fourteen second-year students…

An assessment was developed using entries from the macromolecular Crystallographic Information File that was given to students in an upper level bioinformatics class at the end of the semester during a 2½ hour time period. Although all students completed the same questions, they were assessed on an individual protein they had worked on during the…

The term "conceptual understanding" has been used rather loosely over the years in educational practice, with a tendency to focus on a few aspects of an extremely complex phenomenon. In this first article of a two-part miniseries on conceptual understanding, we describe the nature of expert (versus novice) knowledge and show how the conceptual…