This longitudinal study examines the responses of students at two different institutions to creative exercises related to models of chemical bonding. Questions in the form of creative exercises required students to provide relevant, accurate, and distinct statements about two compounds for which they were provided only the formula and electronegativity values: SCl 2 and CaCl 2 . Students responded to the questions at the end of general chemistry, six months later, and one year later. Their responses were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively to explore patterns in application of bonding ideas and change over time. The data reveal extensive application of covalent bonding ideas to an ionic compound, regardless of whether a student identified the substance as ionic or not, and that this is consistent over a year out. Implications for instruction of bonding models in general chemistry (and beyond) are discussed.

Data visualization accelerates the communication of quantitative measures across many fields, including education, but few visualization methods exist for qualitative data in educational fields that capture both the context-specific information and summarize trends for instructors. In this paper, we design an interface to visualize students' weekly journal entries collected as formative educational assessments from an undergraduate data visualization course and a statistics course. Using these qualitative data, we present an interactive WordStream and word cloud to show the temporal and topic-based organization of students' development during instruction and explore the patterns, trends, and diversity of student ideas in a context-specific way. Informed by the Technology Acceptance Model, we used an informal user study to evaluate the perceived ease of use and usefulness of the tool for instructors using journal entries. Our evaluation found the tool to be intuitive, clear, and easy-to-use to explore student entries, especially words of interest, but might be limited by focusing on word frequencies rather than underlying relationships among the student's ideas or other measures in assessment. Implications and challenges for bridging qualitative data for educational assessment with data visualization methods are discussed. CCS CONCEPTS• Applied computing → Education; • Human-centered computing → Visualization systems and tools; Information visualization.

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Community-based learning (CBL), also known as service learning (SL), provides students with an active and meaningful learning environment and has been studied in STEM courses for several decades. Chemistry for the Community is a novel chemistry curriculum that weaves service-learning projects throughout multiple courses, including gateway courses, and allows students to build self-efficacy and transferable skills. Over a three-year period, students experienced multiple projects while enrolled in two-semester general and organic chemistry courses and one-semester organic survey, environmental, and analytical chemistry courses. Student experiences, gathered by surveys, reflections, and interviews, were compared to those of students conducting equivalent non-SL projects, as well as projects conducted virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Public communication and community partner interaction emerged as major themes from the data and were explored through the lens of self-determination theory. Results indicate that students were anxious about their role but were motivated by community partner interaction. Project completion corresponded to an increase in self-efficacy regarding similar future tasks with students perceiving benefits of multiple experiences.