Resumen de Investigating the Impact of Assessment Practices on the Performance of Students Perceived to Be at Risk of Failure in Second-Semester General Chemistry
Lisa Shah, Adan Fatima, Ahmad Syed, Eric Glasser
What and how instructors assess understandably impacts student learning and performance in undergraduate science courses. However, there is limited research on the ways in which assessment practices might be altered to combat inequitable outcomes in these settings. Here we characterize the nature of assessment questions in one second-semester general chemistry course over four semesters and report the performance of students regarded to be at risk of failure based on their mathematics placement exam scores (GCI-S students) and their peers (GCI-M students) at the level of each content topic and cognitive question type. Our findings indicate that executing–quantitative questions were overwhelmingly more prevalent than any other question type. Notably, recalling and executing–quantitative question types contributed most to topic-level performance differences between students perceived to be at-risk and their peers. However, these students performed at least as well as their peers on comparing and inferring–predicting questions across most topics, question types that appear to represent relative assets of GCI-S students. We discuss the implications of these results on assessment practices in, and research on, undergraduate science education as they relate to issues of equity.
