Journal article
You Are What You Assess: The Case for Emphasizing Chemistry on Chemistry Assessments
Journal of chemical education, Vol.98(8), pp.2490-2495
08/10/2021
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.1c00532
Abstract
What we emphasize and reward on assessments signals to students what matters to us. Accordingly, a great deal of scholarship in chemistry education has focused on defining the sorts of performances worth assessing. Here, we unpack observations we made while analyzing what “success” meant across three large-enrollment general chemistry environments. We observed that students enrolled in two of the three environments could succeed without ever connecting atomic/molecular behavior to how and why phenomena happen. These environments, we argue, were not really “chemistry classes” but rather opportunities for students to gain proficiency with a jumble of skills and factual recall. However, one of the three environments dedicated 14–57% of points on exams to items with the potential to engage students in using core ideas (e.g., energy, bonding interactions) to predict, explain, or model observable events. This course, we argue, is more aligned with the intellectual work of the chemical sciences than the other two. If our courses assess solely (or largely) decontextualized skills and factual recall we risk (1) gating access to STEM careers on the basis of facility with skills most students will never use outside the classroom and (2) never allowing students to experience the tremendous predictive and explanatory power of atomic/molecular models. We implore the community to reflect on whether “what counts” in the courses we teach aligns with the performances we actually value.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- You Are What You Assess: The Case for Emphasizing Chemistry on Chemistry Assessments
- Creators
- Ryan L Stowe - Department of ChemistryLeah J Scharlott - Department of ChemistryVanessa R Ralph - Department of ChemistryNicole M Becker - Department of ChemistryMelanie M Cooper - Department of Chemistry
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Journal of chemical education, Vol.98(8), pp.2490-2495
- DOI
- 10.1021/acs.jchemed.1c00532
- ISSN
- 0021-9584
- eISSN
- 1938-1328
- Publisher
- American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc
- Grant note
- DOI: 10.13039/100001395, name: Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation; DOI: 10.13039/100000172, name: Division of Undergraduate Education, award: DUE 0816692, DUE 1043707, DUE 1420005, DUE 1725520; DOI: 10.13039/100007028, name: Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 08/10/2021
- Academic Unit
- Chemistry
- Record Identifier
- 9984216611902771
Metrics
20 Record Views