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Will We Be Responsible for That on the Exam?
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John W. Moore
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706-1396 |
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This issue is out of print. |
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"What's going to be on the test?" is perhaps the most common and least welcome of the questions students ask teachers. The ubiquity of this question underscores the importance of testing in our courses as they are currently organized, but assessment of students is often overlooked as we try to reform courses and curricula. What we ask and how we ask it are fundamental, and must be based on clear goals for what we and our students should accomplish in chemistry courses. Student assessment is arguably the most important issue we face as we reexamine and reform our curricula. A strong case can be made that students use quizzes, tests, and examinations as their principal guide to what is important in a course. Besides asking what will and will not be on a test, students invariably want to have a practice exam or copies of previous exams to study from. Indeed, study itself is often chiefly motivated by (and increases greatly in intensity before) examinations. In many courses quizzes or exams are among the few times when essentially every student is concentrating on and actively involved in dealing with the subject matter. The course syllabus may never be looked at after the first day of class, but old exams will certainly be perused with interest and intensity. As teachers we constantly exhort students to think, to approach problems systematically and persistently, and to attempt to consolidate and generalize their learning. We want them to understand and be comfortable with the principles underlying the many facts and ideas that we present in our courses. We want them to retain what they have learned over the long term, not just until they get through the final exam or the MCAT. We want them to be able to function effectively in collaborative teams on the job in industry or doing fundamental research. But we often are dissatisfied with how well most of them are able to do these things. Despite our arguments to the contrary, students are right to concentrate on specific items over which they expect to be examined. Given the emphasis placed on grades and exam scores as determinants of who can pursue what career, what else could rational individuals do? If students are behaving rationally, but not behaving in the ways we would like, perhaps it is the system we have placed them in that needs fixing. Some time ago (1) I stated that "the greatest impediment to progress regarding the chemistry curriculum is our lack of ability to measure whether we have accomplished increased student learning of the kind we really want." That remains true today, and it is a problem that must be solved before we can make successful, effective changes in what we do as teachers. There are a variety of approaches to this problem, but most of them involve orchestrating more realistic situations by which we can determine whether or not students have learned. The software in this issue exemplifies two possibilities. VizQuiz provides for inclusion in quizzes of color graphics, molecular models, animations, video from a laserdisc player, and digitized video. As more and more textbooks include more and more color images and diagrams, and as more and more of us move toward multimedia presentations in classes, multimedia quizzing is becoming a necessity. Presenting fancy graphics or video in class will do little good unless we also ask students to interpret similar graphics or video as part of our assessment of their learning. Enhancing Quantum Chemistry with Mathcad asks students to study interactively by using Mathcad's many numeric and symbolic mathematics features to explore quantum principles and answer pertinent questions during the process of reading about the subject. Though not explicitly designed for assessment, these lessons provide a mechanism for students to create their own personal documents describing their understanding of quantum chemistry. Like term papers in the social sciences and humanities, Mathcad documents that students create by editing the templates in this issue can provide excellent means for assessment. Tools like those in this issue provide new freedom and new opportunities for improvement of the most important aspect of what we do as teachers. Freedom and opportunity also imply responsibility. I hope that a large community of readers will begin using these and other new means of assessment extensively and creatively. Literature Cited |
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Last Updated: April 26, 2001 Created: March 6, 1997 |
Created by: J. L. Holmes Comments to: jceonline@chem.wisc.edu |
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| © 1997 Division of Chemical Education, Inc., American Chemical Society. All rights reserved. | |