Development of the Flame Test Concept Inventory: Measuring Student Thinking about Atomic Emission

Abstract

This study reports the development of a 19-item Flame Test Concept Inventory, an assessment tool to measure students’ understanding of atomic emission. Fifty-two students enrolled in secondary and postsecondary chemistry courses were interviewed about atomic emission and explicitly asked to explain flame test demonstrations and energy level diagrams. Analysis of students’ explanations offered insight into students’ alternative conceptions and was used to design items and distractors for a 19-item Flame Test Concept Inventory about atomic emission. Results from a pilot study with first-year university chemistry and with upper-division chemistry students were analyzed to create a final version of the inventory that was administered to both secondary students (N = 459) and first-year university students (N = 100) who had completed formal instruction and course assessment about atomic emission. Analysis of student responses indicated the inventory generated valid and reliable data. Common alternative conceptions about atomic emission that remain postinstruction and their prevalence are discussed.

A Convenient, Effective, and Safer Flame Demonstration

“…The published procedures have their advantages, but none offer improvement in all aspects of the demonstration as outlined by our experimental criteria -controlled burning, low risk, brilliant color, convenient setup/clean up, portable, long lasting and green. 4,9 Low Risk/Controlled Burning: Our method has a strong safety advantage as we only employ a controlled flame. This differs from many of the other methods, where the flame is only extinguished through the consumption of the flammable material or through the employment of fire suppression methods.…”

“…The published procedures have their advantages, but none offer improvement in all aspects of the demonstration, as outlined by our experimental criteria: controlled burning, low risk, brilliant color, convenient setup/clean up, portable, long lasting, and green. , …”

“…The flame demonstration, also known as the rainbow demonstration or rainbow flame test, is visually appealing and used by instructors to display atomic emission phenomena that occurs in common items such as neon lights and fireworks. , Topics of quantum theory of matter, descriptive chemistry, and elemental analysis are also reinforced by this demonstration . In their work on the student understanding of atomic emissions, Bretz and Mayo reported that between 1928 and 2015, the Journal of Chemical Education alone published 32 different methods for this test …”

Development of the Water Instrument: a comprehensive measure of students’ knowledge of fundamental concepts in general chemistry

“…The chemistry education research (CER) community has developed many assessments that have been used to evaluate instructional and educational interventions, and measure students' understanding of specific chemistry concepts (Mulford and Robinson, 2002;Wren and Barbera, 2013a;Taskin et al, 2015;Atkinson et al, 2020). The most common form of these assessments are concept inventories (Chandrasegaran et al, 2007;Sreenivasulu and Subramaniam, 2013;Wren and Barbera, 2013b;Bretz and Murata Mayo, 2018), which have been used in CER for over 30 years (Treagust, 1988). Concept inventories are also commonly used in other STEM fields with some notable examples such as the Force Concept Inventory (Hestenes et al, 1992), the Genetics Concept Assessment (Smith, Wood, and Knight, 2008), and the Biology Concept Inventory (Garvin-Doxas and Klymkowsky, 2008).…”

Exploring Emission and Absorption Spectroscopy in the First-Year General Chemistry Laboratory

“…Technological advances have made devices like emission and absorption spectrometers more portable and affordable, providing opportunities to incorporate these techniques into large classes which would not have been previously feasible. While portable and comparatively inexpensive absorption spectrometers have been broadly available for several years, atomic emission can now be studied using simple emission spectrometers, studying atomic line spectra and continuous spectra from several lamp sources − and from a series of flame tests. ,− Absorption studies can be carried out using simple spectrometers, allowing for the comparison between absorption and emission instrumental techniques.…”