News
Dr. Popova awarded $345K NSF grant!
Representational competence is a set of skills for using disciplinary representations for learning, communicating, and problem-solving. These skills are at the heart of engagement in scientific practices. Despite the important role that representational competence plays in student success in chemistry and the considerable number of investigations into students’ ability to reason with representations, no assessments currently exist that capture and measure these skills. With support from NSF’s EHR Core Research Building Capacity in STEM Education Research (ECR: BCSER) program, this project seeks to develop a novel assessment instrument to measure representational competence skills. By leading this project, the principal investigator will develop competency in educational testing and psychometrics, to complement her established expertise in qualitative investigation of students’ understanding of chemistry concepts and qualitative characterization of instructors’ teaching beliefs and classroom practices. The principal investigator will undergo mentoring by Dr. Jeffrey R. Raker, an expert in the area of assessment of content and evaluation of affect in both postsecondary organic chemistry and inorganic chemistry courses. This study will use a combination of classical test theory and factor analysis methods to develop and test the Organic Chemistry Representational Competence Assessment (ORCA). ORCA will measure student representational competence skills in the context of representations that are commonly used in organic chemistry. The targeted skills to be measured include: the ability (a) to interpret these representations, (b) to select an appropriate representation for a particular purpose, (c) to make connections across these representations, and (d) to use these representations to make predictions about chemical phenomena. The measurement quality framework, that targets select psychometric evidence informed by the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, will be used as the conceptual and methodological framework for evaluating the quality of ORCA’s items and its capacity to assist in drawing valid and reliable inferences about student representational competence skills. The instrument will be rigorously evaluated and tested with organic chemistry students from University of North Carolina at Greensboro and University of South Florida. As an outcome of this project, the scientific community will obtain a novel tool for research, while college instructors will acquire a high-quality assessment to make informed decisions about their teaching.
Bellow is a picture of Jeff and Maia drinking champagne to celebrate this grant award!
