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…

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…