It is commonly said that perception is everything. Political candidates are judged by how the public understands their platforms; consumers make purchases based on how they view the products; and business executives make corporate decisions based on potential outcomes of business deals. Likewise, a person's preconception of a topic can change how they learn about and associate that knowledge. Topics with a shared vocabulary between science and common language, such as the terms used when teaching evolution and phylogenetic trees, are especially subject to misconceptions stemming from a lack of understanding how the terminology is used in science. One way to assess the preconceptions students have about specific topics is through using free association techniques. Free association word recall (word association) activities ask students to recall words and phrases associated with stimulus term. Educators can use student responses to learn how students understand and organize prior knowledge, and thus structure subsequent instruction activities to target the revealed preconceptions of the topic.

Learning theorists have provided ample evidence supporting the use of active, student-centered, social learning environments. However, little action has been taken within U.S. university curricula to transform lecture courses so that they include such teaching methods. By adding cooperative and collaborative activities into large-lecture, introductory biology courses, I was able to measure the impacts of such active-learning strategies on student attendance and performance. I gathered data from two investigations involving 378 undergraduates from paired sections of biology, one section using active-learning activities and one not. In the first investigation, I used a mixed-methods approach to measure the effects of a cooperative pre-exam group discussion on student performance, confidence, and anxiety. In the second investigation, I used a quantitative approach to measure the effects on course attendance and performance of using scenario-based collaborative activities regularly throughout a semester. Students who engaged in cooperative pre-exam discussion did not show significant individual learning gains but did show an increase in confidence and a decrease in anxiety. Students who engaged in scenario-based collaborative activities showed significantly higher learning gains and course attendance. The identified gains are promising for course reform.