Sketchy understandings: Drawings reveal where students may need additional support to understand scale and abstraction in common representations of DNA
Abstract
Visual representations in molecular biology tend to follow a set of shared conventions for using certain shapes and symbols to convey information about the size and structure of nucleotides, genes, and chromosomes. Understanding how and why biologists use these conventions to represent DNA is a key part of visual literacy in molecular biology. Visual literacy, which is the ability to read and interpret visual representations, encompasses a set of skills that are necessary for biologists to effectively use models to communicate about molecular structures that cannot be directly observed. To gauge students visual literacy skills, we conducted semi-structured interviews with undergraduate students who had completed at least a year of biology courses. We asked students to draw and interpret figures of nucleotides, genes, and chromosomes, and we analyzed their drawings for adherence to conventions for representing scale and abstraction. We found that 77% of students made errors in representing scale and 86% of students made errors in representing abstraction. We also observed about half of the students in our sample using the conventional shapes and symbols to represent DNA in unconventional ways. These unconventional sketches may signal an incomplete understanding of the structure and function of DNA. Our findings indicate that students may need additional instructional support to interpret the conventions in common representations of DNA. We highlight opportunities for instructors to scaffold visual literacy skills into their teaching to help students better understand visual conventions for representing scale and abstraction in molecular biology.
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In-depth summary
Claude Opus 5.5 · xhigh effort · 8 Nov 2026 · from the full text of version 1 (2 Mar 2025) · CC BY-NC 4.0
Drawing-based interviews with 35 biology undergraduates show 77% made scale errors and 86% made abstraction errors when sketching nucleotides, genes, and chromosomes against the DNA Landscape framework.
Communicating about molecular structures requires visual literacy in the symbol conventions biologists use across levels of scale and abstraction. Although diagrams of nucleotides, genes, and chromosomes are ubiquitous in undergraduate biology, students' ability to generate and interpret these conventions had not been systematically mapped using student drawings.
Key results
ShownNearly all interviewed biology undergraduates produced at least one DNA sketch that diverged from expert visual conventions.
Across 35 students generating 277 unique sketches of nucleotides, genes, and chromosomes, 97% (n = 34) drew at least one misaligned representation, and 49% of all sketches (n = 137) contained errors or unconventional uses of scale and/or abstraction. · Methods; Results; How often did sketches contain errors or…
ShownAbstraction errors were the most widespread student difficulty, occurring frequently in highly abstract representations such as double helices, X-shaped chromosomes, and box-and-line gene diagrams.
Abstraction errors appeared in at least one drawing for 86% of students (29% of all 277 sketches, such as depicting a DNA helix as two RNA strands or including a poly A tail and spliced exons in a gene), while 10% showed unconventional abstraction (such as coloring only one sister chromatid). · Abstract; How often did sketches contain errors or…; What did errors in abstraction look like?; What does unconventional abstraction look like?
ShownMore than three-quarters of students misrepresented molecular scale, most commonly under- or overestimating the size of a gene relative to nucleotides or chromosomes.
Scale errors occurred in at least one drawing for 77% of students (17% of all 277 sketches, with no unconventional scale and n = 14 sketches having both scale and abstraction errors), including depicting an entire gene as 3 nucleotide base pairs or as half to all of a chromosome arm. · Abstract; How often did sketches contain errors or…; What did errors in scale look like?; What does it look like when sketches contain…
Methods, data and reproducibility
Conducted 45-minute semi-structured Zoom interviews with 35 undergraduates who had completed at least one year of biology coursework, prompting them to draw and interpret representations of chromosomes, nucleotides, and genes paired with items from three validated concept assessments. Two raters structurally coded 277 student sketches and verbal transcripts against the 3x3 DNA Landscape matrix.
- Semi-structured Zoom interviews and student-generated sketches of nucleotides, genes, and chromosomes · human · n = 35 undergraduate students from 2 institutions, 277 unique sketches
- Methods & tools
- DNA Landscape, Genetics Concept Assessment, BioMolViz, GenBio-MAPS, Zoom
- Reproducibility gaps
- Full interview transcripts and the complete set of 277 student sketches are not deposited in a public repository.
Limitations (3)
- Participants were sampled from only two institutions, so the observed error frequencies in scale and abstraction may not generalize to all undergraduate biology populations. · stated by the authors
- Eleven participants drew sketches on the Zoom whiteboard while 24 drew on paper, introducing potential variation in drawing quality due to familiarity with the digital platform. · stated by the authors
- The coding framework intentionally focused on student errors and misunderstandings rather than quantifying productive student reasoning about molecular structures. · stated by the authors
Who should read:Read this if you teach molecular biology or study biology education and want empirical examples of how undergraduates misinterpret DNA diagrams across scales.
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