Impact of COVID-19 Curricular Shifts on Learning Gains on the Microbiology for Health Sciences Concept Inventory

As a validated assessment, the Microbiology for Health Sciences Concept Inventory (MHSCI) is a valuable tool to evaluate student progress in health sciences microbiology courses. In this brief analysis, we survey MHSCI faculty users and report student MHSCI scores to determine the impact on student learning gains of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent quarantine in spring 2020. Although a majority of students reported moving to a fully online lecture and lab microbiology course in the spring 2020 semester, there was no statistically significant impact on student outcomes reported by the MHSCI, and by some measures, student learning gains increased in the semester students moved to online learning. Further research is necessary to determine the continuing impact of online lecture/lab courses on student outcomes on the MHSCI. Our analysis of data from spring 2020 shows that the MHSCI is still a statistically reliable measure of student misconceptions and overall difficulty scores for each item on the MHSCI was unchanged due to the pandemic.