Assessment of Process Skills in Analytical Chemistry Student Responses to Open-Ended Exam Questions

Abstract

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.

Student Feedback on Distance Learning in the Quantitative Chemical Analysis Laboratory

“…These findings suggest that there is a need for different and more engaging instructional models. For face-to-face laboratories, successful instructional models have included the science writing heuristic, − process-oriented guided-inquiry learning, − argument driven inquiry, − and writing-to-teach, to name a few. Each of these instructional models would be challenging to implement in the format described by the authors in an online learning environment.…”

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“…POGIL (process oriented guided inquiry learning) pedagogy incorporates process skills (oral and written communication, problem solving, teamwork, critical thinking, self-assessment, and information management) alongside content knowledge within courses . It was shown that, for analytical chemistry student responses, including data such as a graph, figure, or table can elicit evidence of information processing particularly where the data source is explicitly prompted . With this in mind, prompts were included in the questions, e.g., “using the absorbance values” and “reflect using examples from previous experiments”.…”

“…2 It was shown that, for analytical chemistry student responses, including data such as a graph, figure, or table can elicit evidence of information processing particularly where the data source is explicitly prompted. 3 With this in mind, prompts were included in the questions, e.g., "using the absorbance values" and "reflect using examples from previous experiments".…”

Practical randomly selected question exam design to address replicated and sequential questions in online examinations

“…Thus, to circumvent these drawbacks of procuring technologies, educators indicated the designing of examination questions to mitigate cheating and answer-sharing. Suggestions involved developing examination questions using open-ended questions or take-home examinations as effective solutions (Bengtsson, 2019 ; Schmidt-McCormack, Fish, Falke, Lantz, & Cole, 2019 ). These questions involve higher levels of student-thought and analysis, resulting in differing answers, enabling the instructor to analyze text-matching (similarity indexing) to safeguard academic integrity.…”