Chemistry education research has increasingly considered the role of affect when investigating chemistry learning environments over the past decade. Despite its popularity in educational spheres, mindset has been understudied from a chemistry-specific perspective. Mindset encompasses one's beliefs about the ability to change intelligence with…

Identity has been proposed as a mechanism to increase persistence within Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education programs. To assess the impact of identity on STEM persistence, measures that produce valid and reliable data within a given STEM discipline need to be employed. Therefore, this study developed and evaluated…

The Science Motivation Questionnaire II (SMQ II) was developed to measure aspects of student motivation in college-level science courses. Items on the SMQ II are structured such that the word 'science' can be replaced with any discipline title (e.g., chemistry) to produce a discipline-specific measure of student motivation. Since its original…

Quasi-experiments are common in studies that estimate the effect of instructional interventions on student performance outcomes. In this type of research, the nature of the experimental design, the choice in assessment, the selection of comparison groups, and the statistical methods used to analyze the comparison data dictate the validity of…

The General, Organic, and Biological Chemistry Knowledge Assessment (GOB-CKA) is a multiple-choice instrument designed to assess students' understanding of the chemistry topics deemed important to clinical nursing practice. This manuscript describes the development process of the individual items along with a psychometric evaluation of the…

Data produced by psychometric instruments are often used to inform understanding about a certain population's knowledge of ideas or perspectives about specific topics. Concept inventories are an example of psychometric instruments used to probe students' content knowledge within a defined framework. Concept inventories have been used as…

Fundamentally concerned with motivation, self-determination theory (SDT) represents a framework of several mini-theories to explore how social context interacts with people's motivational types categorized by degree of regulation internalization. This paper aims to modify an existing theory-based instrument (Academic Motivation Scale, or AMS) and…

Assessing conceptual understanding of foundational topics before instruction on higher-order concepts can provide chemical educators with information to aid instructional design. This study provides an instrument that can be used to identify students' alternative conceptions regarding thermochemistry concepts. The Thermochemistry Concept Inventory…

The Chemical Concepts Inventory (CCI) is a multiple-choice instrument designed to assess the alternate conceptions of students in high school or first-semester college chemistry. The instrument was published in 2002 along with an analysis of its data from a test population. This study supports the initial analysis and expands on the psychometric…

The chemistry version of the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS-Chem) is a new instrument designed to measure students' (novices') beliefs about chemistry and learning chemistry compared to those of experts (instructors). This survey is intended to measure the effects of students' beliefs on learning, and to understand how…