Mapping student understanding in chemistry: The perspectives of Chemists

In prior work, we have been developing a conceptual framework, called the Perspectives of Chemists, that attempts to capture a view of growing understanding in chemistry The framework was developed through Living by Chemistry (LBC), a chemistry curriculum project with an assessment system for secondary and university chemistry objectives called ChemQuery both funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). ChemQuery is an assessment approach that uses this framework of key ideas in the discipline, and criterion-referenced analysis, to map student progress. It includes assessment questions, a scoring rubric, question exemplars, and a framework, which we refer to as the Perspectives of Chemists. Empirical data is then collected combined with Rasch family measurement models (IRT) to help analyze and interpret the data (Wilson, 2005). Student learning progress within or between courses can be described and individual differences can be explored for how students seem to be learning the scientific concepts. Our purpose was to study how students learn so that by knowing what they know we would know how to best help them. At the time, our work represented an early description of a possible learning progression in chemistry that we feel is still relevant today. Therefore this paper will focus on what we have learned about the pathway of student learning in chemistry through the development of the Perspectives framework in the ChemQuery assessment system.