The introduction of the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) by David Hestenes and colleagues in 1992 produced a remarkable impact within the community of physics teachers. An instrument to measure student comprehension of the Newtonian concept of force, the FCI demonstrates that active learning leads to far superior student conceptual learning than didactic lectures. Compared to a working knowledge of physics, biological literacy and illiteracy have an even more direct, dramatic, and personal impact. They shape public research and reproductive health policies, the acceptance or rejection of technological advances, such as vaccinations, genetically modified foods and gene therapies, and, on the personal front, the reasoned evaluation of product claims and lifestyle choices. While many students take biology courses at both the secondary and the college levels, there is little in the way of reliable and valid assessment of the effectiveness of biological education. This lack has important consequences in terms of general bioliteracy and, in turn, for our society. Here we describe the beginning of a community effort to define what a bioliterate person needs to know and to develop, validate, and disseminate a tiered series of instruments collectively known as the Biology Concept Inventory (BCI), which accurately measures student comprehension of concepts in introductory, genetic, molecular, cell, and developmental biology. The BCI should serve as a lever for moving our current educational system in a direction that delivers a deeper conceptual understanding of the fundamental ideas upon which biology and biomedical sciences are based.

A typical undergraduate biology curriculum covers a very large number of concepts and details. We describe the development of a Biology Concept Framework (BCF) as a possible way to organize this material to enhance teaching and learning. Our BCF is hierarchical, places details in context, nests related concepts, and articulates concepts that are inherently obvious to experts but often difficult for novices to grasp. Our BCF is also cross-referenced, highlighting interconnections between concepts. We have found our BCF to be a versatile tool for design, evaluation, and revision of course goals and materials. There has been a call for creating Biology Concept Inventories, multiple-choice exams that test important biology concepts, analogous to those in physics, astronomy, and chemistry. We argue that the community of researchers and educators must first reach consensus about not only what concepts are important to test, but also how the concepts should be organized and how that organization might influence teaching and learning. We think that our BCF can serve as a catalyst for community-wide discussion on organizing the vast number of concepts in biology, as a model for others to formulate their own BCFs and as a contribution toward the creation of a comprehensive BCF.