How To Recognize Success and Failure: Practical Assessment of an Evolving, First-Semester Laboratory Program Using Simple, Outcome-Based Tools

Abstract

This paper presents the use of simple, outcome-based assessment tools to design and evaluate the first semester of a new introductory laboratory program created to teach green analytical chemistry using environmental samples. This general chemistry laboratory program, like many introductory courses, has a wide array of stakeholders within and beyond the major. Among the stakeholders, there was low-level yet widespread apprehension that changes in the introductory level content would weaken student preparation. Because of this unease, it was important to prove to faculty and students alike that the new laboratory program could effectively help students reach the new laboratory learning goals without sacrificing technical content. A set of simple assessment tools, student precision and accuracy data from experiments during the semester, and a laboratory practical and a student survey from the end of the semester were used as both formative and summative program assessments. This article establishes the power of these simple, course-embedded tools to yield insights into program strengths and weaknesses and, ultimately, to demonstrate to all faculty and students the effectiveness of this first-semester program.

Evaluating Chinese Secondary School Students’ Understanding of Green Chemistry

“…The assessment data reflect the effectiveness of teaching and are conducive to improving the existing course designs (Armstrong et al, 2018). When students complete the corresponding learning modules, researchers generally select diagnostic instruments to evaluate the learning performance and effectiveness of the curriculum based on the investigated factors (Gron et al, 2013). Green chemistry can be considered updated content in chemistry education, and as such, must be assessed correspondingly.…”

“…The Likert scale is one of the most prevalently used tools (Armstrong et al, 2018) among researchers of green chemistry education (Gron et al, 2013;Aubrecht et al, 2015;Garner et al, 2015) to eliminate complicated written exams from the learning process (Gron et al, 2013;Aubrecht et al, 2015) and to design formative and summative instruments for assessing students' learning performance. With the assistance of data collected through large-scale questionnaire surveys, some scholars found that Chinese students lack the awareness of green chemistry (Qiao et al, 2013;Jia, 2018), have insufficient understanding of green chemistry (He et al, 2013;Wang et al, 2017), and possess a limited ability to apply green chemistry-related knowledge (Gu and Wang, 2019).…”

“…Therefore, an assessment of students' understanding of and awareness on green chemistry is crucial to achieve the corresponding educational goals. The existing instruments related to green chemistry mainly used to assess students' environmental and green chemistry awareness are mostly based on interviews (Mandler et al, 2012;Karpudewan et al, 2015b;Shamuganathana and Karpudewan, 2017), questionnaire surveys (Qiao et al, 2013;Aubrecht et al, 2015), tests (Karpudewan et al, 2015a), and student self-report surveys (Gron et al, 2013;Aubrecht et al, 2015;Kennedy, 2016;Shamuganathana and Karpudewan, 2017). Unfortunately, there is a lack of a reliable tool to comprehensively evaluate the understanding of green chemistry concepts among secondary school students.…”

Integration of algebra and chemistry concepts with molecular descriptors: A problem-based-learning exercise

“…The evolution from the traditional scheme to PBL gave us a set of successful evaluation strategies as consequence of trial-and-error experience. The evaluation instrument design suggests an analysis of the expected learning outcomes (Gron, Bradley, McKenzie, Shinn, & Teague, 2013) -See Table 1. Written exams, group reports, portfolios and questionnaires are efficient instruments to evaluate specific learning outcomes, but they avoid the self-and co-evaluation.…”

Implementing Competency-based Assessment in an Undergraduate Thermodynamics Course

“…They indicate that CBL may be beneficial for the success of a diverse student body and may also serve the needs of industry, which needs a cadre of engineers who have mastered fundamental engineering skills. Discussions of implementation of a variety of CBL-related methods in engineering programs have been published, such as [5] and [6]. Some papers focus heavily on CBL for the "soft skills" embedded within engineering programs, such as [7].…”