Assessment in Chemistry Education

Abstract

AbstractKnowing what students know and can do is challenging business, as we cannot directly examine what any given person is thinking. Instead, we must construct opportunities for students to make their thinking visible and interpret the evidence elicited from these opportunities to infer progress toward desired outcomes. Here we describe the approach of “assessments as evidentiary arguments” and examine several types of assessments that are used to evaluate the learning of college chemistry students. Throughout this discussion, we will pay especial attention to the assumptions (or lack thereof) that particular assessment strategies make about how students learn. We have limited discussion to what students know and can do with regards to chemistry and chemical phenomena. That is, we are not concerned here with assessment of affective constructs (e. g. motivation, identity).