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pp. 345-360 | Article Number: ijese.2019.029
Published Online: August 15, 2019
Abstract
One of the main problems in biology education is the need to know which topics in school biology are not understandable to students and which impede them to get good results in university entrance tests. The aim of the current study is to gain an overview of biological knowledge of students, who are intending to continue their education in the faculty of medicine by the end of their gymnasium studies and what are the crucial topics in which they underachieve. Based on these results, it is expected to make theoretically justified decisions what topics of biology should be emphasized in school biology and how to develop the school biology curriculum to meet the needs of competence-based biology education. The sample for this study was formed of 1017 gymnasium graduate students who fulfilled the medicine faculty entrance tests in biology (METIB) in four years (2015–2018). Based on the students’ test results the tasks were categorized into four achievement levels - advanced, high, intermediate and low-performance level. The most difficult topics for students occurred to be molecules and structures and human anatomy and physiology. Research data was collected using four METIBs, which were composed of 50-item multiple-choice questions. The Latent profile analysis of test results enabled to detect three achievement profiles of students – high, moderate and low achievers. In four years of this study, the distribution of students’ test scores was in correspondence with the normal distribution and was also in accordance with the Estonian National Curriculum assessment regulation system, with 15% of gymnasium graduate students achieving the highest score level and being successful in entering the faculty of medicine.
Keywords: entrance test in biology, biology test construction, core topics in biology, test evaluation, assessment results, students’ achievement profiles
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