Resumen de Building a Database for the Historical Analysis of the General Chemistry Curriculum Using ACS General Chemistry Exams as Artifacts
Cynthia J. Luxford, Kimberly J. Linenberger, Jeffrey R. Raker, John Y. Baluyut, Jessica J. Reed, Chamila De Silva, Thomas A. Holme
As a discipline, chemistry enjoys a unique position. While many academic areas prepared "cooperative examinations" in the 1930s, only chemistry maintained the activity within what has become the ACS Examinations Institute. As a result, the long-term existence of community-built, norm-referenced, standardized exams provides a historical artifact about the nature of content coverage in courses that stretches over decades. This work reports efforts to capture information and formulate it into a database about general chemistry content coverage over the past 20 years. Roughly 2000 items have been characterized in several ways, including (i) content, using an Anchoring Concepts Content Map; (ii) item construct, such as the presence of symbolic or visual information; and (iii) cognitive processing required, in terms of recall, algorithmic, or conceptual thinking.
