Assessment, including course exams, clearly indicates to students what learning goals they are expected to master in a certain course. However, most of these assessments tend to focus on generating a correct answer rather than on the type of reasoning or skills used to arrive at the answer. If educators value skills in addition to the correctness of an answer, it is important that they assess them. As part of the ANA-POGIL (analytical process oriented guided inquiry learning) project, the ANA-POGIL team developed a set of process-rich or guided-inquiry-type assessment questions to be used on exams. These questions were designed to mirror the structure of the POGIL activities, where students were provided data in the form of a table, graph, or set of information with the intention of eliciting evidence of process skills such as information processing, problem solving, and critical thinking in the students’ written responses. This study presents an analysis of student responses gathered from multiple institutions over several semesters to determine characteristics of questions that are likely to elicit evidence of process skills. Results of this project can provide some insight and recommendations to instructors about how to construct questions to elicit evidence of desired skills.

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Abstract. The passive treatment of abandoned mine drainage using wetlands will produce a significant amount of iron rich sludge which will require costly removal and disposal. An alternative to disposal may be the use of this iron oxide material as pigments which could defray some of these costs. In this research, iron deposits from five alkaline mine drainage wetlands were collected and a series of standard tests were run.The tests included loss on ignition, moisture, pH, acid soluble metals, oil absorption, and water soluble matter.The results of these tests were compared to those acheived using commercially available natural and synthetic iron oxides. The results indicate that iron oxides from constructed wetlands have chemical properties that are intermediate to those of natural and synthetic iron oxide products.

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Two techniques for the extraction of a series of organochlorine compounds (chlorinated benzenes, polychlorinated biphenyls, DDT, DDE, and mirex) from centrifuged Niagara River water were compared. The more hydrophobic compounds were extracted more efficiently by a digestion technique than by conventional hexane extraction. Plots of the relative recovery (R = undigested/digested) versus log of the octanol-water coefficient (K ow ) show R decreasing exponentially with log Kow. This decrease suggests that the digestion-extraction recovers both the dissolved fraction and the fraction bound to organic matter, although conventional solvent extraction does not recover the bound fraction efficiently. H UMIC ACIDS, FULVIC ACIDS, AND DISSOLVED ORGANIC MATTER, which arefound in all natural waters, are very complex compounds of both aquatic and terrestrial origin. Humic substances are polyelectrolytes containing both aromatic and aliphatic carbon with phenolic, alcoholic, carbonyl, acidic, and amino functional groups.