Research

Design and evaluation of the Organic chemistry Representational Competence Assessment (ORCA) instrument

While most chemistry education research focuses on student learning outcomes alone, the relationships between faculty instruction and said learning outcomes have received little attention comparatively. Thus, this project focuses on developing an assessment instrument that will be used to shed light on the interplay between faculty teaching practices and beliefs and organic chemistry student learning and skills acquisition. Additionally, preparation of a highly qualified workforce requires both an emphasis on knowledge acquisition and on the development of key domain-specific skills. Thus, this project would develop a unique instrument that will capture not only students’ conceptual understanding, but also their representational competence. The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing will be used to guide the team in conducting psychometric analyses to evaluate whether ORCA yields scores that can lead to valid and reliable interpretations. The project is supported by an ECR: BCSER NSF grant.

The objectives of the project are:

• To conduct interviews with organic chemistry students to capture and characterize their representational competence skills in the context of most commonly used organic chemistry representations of molecular structure (e.g., Lewis structures, skeletal structures, dash-wedge diagrams, Newman projections, chair conformations).
• To generate ORCA items and distractors on the basis of students’ responses during semi-structured, think-aloud interviews.
• To establish internal structure validity and internal consistency/reliability using factor analysis methods.
• To use ORCA to measure student representational competence and conceptual understanding.