Curriculum, Pedagogy & Assessment

What do we want to know about our students' thinking? Categorizing chemistry formative assessments with ACCT.

Formative assessment questions provide a useful lens into students' minds regarding what they are thinking about chemistry. By ascertaining what students are thinking, teachers can make decisions regarding what to do with what they learn. The members of ACCT (Assessing for Change in Chemical Thinking) presented a ChemEd X Talk on the topic on May 26th. You can watch the edited recording of this Talk and find more resources here.

Teaching Chemistry With Case Studies

Case studies have been a staple of undergraduate and graduate education programs like medicine, law, and business, for many years. They let learners engage with simulated real-world situations, making the content more meaningful and connected to their future careers. As a valuable context-based learning tool, case studies are becoming more common in secondary science. Here, we'll explore the role that students and instructors play when learning with case studies.

What informs the grade a student earns in your class? w/ Erica Posthuma

Grades should provide feedback to students, parents, and teachers as to the progress students are making toward learning targets. Meaningful grades require good assessment practices. Erica Posthuma presented a ChemEd X Talk on May 11th, 2021, providing an overview of effective assessment design. She discussed writing and communicating learning goals, developing targeted questions and prompts, and scoring using a standards-based approach. You can watch the edited recording of Erica's Talk here.

Managing Student Collaboration with Kristen Drury & Stephanie O'Brien

POGIL activities can be used to engage students in chemistry lessons through the use of student teams, effective models, and tiered questioning. Kristen Drury and Stephanie O'Brien presented in a ChemEd X Talk on April 21, 2021 and provided teachers with guidance on fostering student buy-in, student role formation, and POGIL implementation. Additionally, information was shared on how to assess students' participation in POGIL activities holistically and through individual examination of process skills such as communication, teamwork, and problem solving. You can watch the edited recording of their Talk here.