The lack of an instructional definition of bioinformatics delays its effective integration into biology coursework. Using an iterative process, our team of biologists, a mathematician/computer scientist, and a bioinformatician together with an educational evaluation and assessment specialist, developed an instructional definition of the discipline: Bioinformatics is “an interdisciplinary field that is concerned with the development and application of algorithms that analyze biological data to investigate the structure and function of biological polymers and their relationships to living systems.” The field is defined in terms of its two primary foundational disciplines, biology and computer science, and its interdisciplinary nature. At the same time, we also created a rubric for assessing open‐ended responses to a prompt about what bioinformatics is and how it is used. The rubric has been shown to be reliable in successive rounds of testing using both common percent agreement (89.7%) and intraclass correlation coefficient (0.620) calculations. We offer the definition and rubric to life sciences instructors to help further integrate bioinformatics into biology instruction, as well as for fostering further educational research projects.

中文翻译：

---

生物信息学教学的教学定义和评估标准

生物信息学教学定义的缺乏延迟了其与生物课程作业的有效整合。通过迭代过程，我们的生物学家、数学家/计算机科学家和生物信息学家与教育评估和评估专家一起制定了该学科的教学定义：生物信息学是“一个涉及开发和应用的跨学科领域分析生物数据以研究生物聚合物的结构和功能及其与生命系统关系的算法。” 该领域是根据其两个主要基础学科（生物学和计算机科学）及其跨学科性质来定义的。同时，我们还创建了一个标准，用于评估对有关什么是生物信息学及其使用方式的提示的开放式反应。在使用共同百分比一致性 (89.7%) 和组内相关系数 (0.620) 计算的连续轮次测试中，该量规已被证明是可靠的。我们为生命科学教师提供定义和标题，以帮助将生物信息学进一步整合到生物学教学中，并促进进一步的教育研究项目。