Assessment

My Modified Grading Strategy

Anthony Stetzenmeyer's grading strategy provides an alternative option to offering required retakes on summative assessments. It has the added bonus of helping his AP chemistry students prepare for the AP exam while learning to cut their losses.

A Highly-Scaffolded Activity for Helping Students Generate Exam Review Questions and See Patterns in Quantitative Problem Solving

Helping students develop abstract understanding is a universal goal. This article describes an activity that involves students developing and then solving novel quantitative chemistry problems following a MadLibsTM style framework.

What do we want to know about our students' thinking? Categorizing chemistry formative assessments with ACCT.

Formative assessment questions provide a useful lens into students' minds regarding what they are thinking about chemistry. By ascertaining what students are thinking, teachers can make decisions regarding what to do with what they learn. The members of ACCT (Assessing for Change in Chemical Thinking) presented a ChemEd X Talk on the topic on May 26th. You can watch the edited recording of this Talk and find more resources here.

What informs the grade a student earns in your class? w/ Erica Posthuma

Grades should provide feedback to students, parents, and teachers as to the progress students are making toward learning targets. Meaningful grades require good assessment practices. Erica Posthuma presented a ChemEd X Talk on May 11th, 2021, providing an overview of effective assessment design. She discussed writing and communicating learning goals, developing targeted questions and prompts, and scoring using a standards-based approach. You can watch the edited recording of Erica's Talk here.

What do you want to know about your students' chemical thinking? Categorizing chemistry formative assessments

In order to teach chemistry effectively, we must ascertain what our students are thinking about chemistry and make a decision regarding what to do with what we learn. Formative assessment questions provide a useful lens into students' minds regarding what they are thinking about chemistry. Let us consider then, how categorizing formative assessment questions could help us plan out our classes more deliberately, in order to better design purposeful written formative assessments that align with our curricular goals. 

Summative Assessment: High Rigor - Low Stress with Katy Dornbos

ChemEd X Talks with Katy Dornbos about how she has transformed the way she is assessing her students - particularly on exams. Her new method of assessing was born from her desire to decrease student stress, minimize her grading time and keep the questions challenging enough to encourage deep thinking. You can watch the edited recording of Katy's Talk here.