Want to learn more?
ACCT team member blogs are an excellent place to learn more about enacting formative assessment. Relevent posts are listed below, and can be found on ChemEd X.
Hidden Messages in Chemistry Assessments
Recently, Michael Farabaugh offered some very nice chemistry exam question examples. I appreciated how he emphasized that questions can be written in ways that make it possible to learn how students think rather than just whether they know the correct answer or not. I was intrigued by Michael’s comments about his progression from figuring out what to teach to figuring out how to teach content and know that students have learned it. There is also another facet that is about why to teach in particular ways and I wanted to share some of my thoughts on this.
Noticing and Interpreting Students Chemical Thinking
As physical distancing continues and we persist in teaching our chemistry classes online, it behooves us as teachers to spend some time considering how we can provide meaningful feedback to our students. Before we can give this feedback, we must purposefully observe and decipher the written work that our students submit.In chemistry classes, the questions that we ask our students to respond to tend to fall (for simplicity’s sake) into two general categories. The first category involves questions for which there are correct answers and incorrect answers, where our goal is for our students to come up with a correct answer independently. The second category of question asks students to share their thinking. In this case, our objective is to learn about how students use chemistry to make decisions and solve problems in the world.