What are core concepts?
Core concepts are big, important, fundamental ideas, which experts agree are critical for all students in their discipline to learn, remember, understand, and apply – in other words, to learn deeply. Core concepts in other disciplines include ideas such as gravity in physics (Hestenes, Wells, & Swackhamer, 1992) and homeostasis in physiology (Michael, Cliff, McFarland, Modell, & Wright, 2017) – these concepts must be learnt and successfully applied by anyone claiming to understand these disciplines. Over the past 30 years, disciplines such as physics (Hestenes et al., 1992), statistics (Allen, Stone, Rhoads, & Murphy, 2004), information technology (Porter et al., 2019), psychology (Landrum, 1993; Zechmeister & Zechmeister, 2000), physiology (McFarland et al., 2017; Michael et al., 2017), and microbiology (Marbach-Ad et al., 2009; Merkel, 2012) have developed research-based lists of core concepts and related assessments of concept attainment.
In biology, for example, a large, coordinated approach led to the development of a set of core concepts in the early 2000s. The US National Science Foundation and American Association of Advancement in Science brought together many educators to produce five core concepts of biology within a Vision and Change Manifesto (Brewer & Smith, 2011). Subsequent work led to the development of resources for biology educators to incorporate the teaching and assessment of these core concepts into their curricula (Brownell, Freeman, Wenderoth, & Crowe, 2014). Sub-disciplines within biology, including physiology and microbiology (Hott et al., 2002; Marbach-Ad et al., 2009; Merkel, 2012) have since identified further, more specific core concepts.