Assessment plays a critical role in instruction and curriculum. Existing literature on instructors' assessment practices and related factors has been intensively focused on primary and secondary education. This study extended the contexts of previous literature to post-secondary chemistry education by exploring general chemistry instructors'…

Providing students with feedback on their performance is a critical part of enhancing student learning in chemistry and is often integrated into homework assignments, quizzes, and exams. However, not all feedback is created equal, and the type of feedback the student receives can dramatically alter the utility of the feedback to reinforce correct…

Concept inventories are widely used in physics education research, yet numerous studies show that concept inventories measure dramatically different learning gains in different demographic groups. Prior studies show that the performance gaps between demographic groups are already present in their preinstruction responses, suggesting that the…

A novel approach is described using primary literature manuscripts for the final examination of an upper level undergraduate course in virology. This innovative technique was applied as an alternative to a core comprehensive final examination. A recent primary literature paper in virology was assigned several weeks before the end of the semester.…

The use of Moodle quizzes as a continuous assessment and an integral part of the educational methodology in higher education has been analyzed in a case study of physical chemistry subject. Two types of quiz designed with different item types and different settings, called basic quiz (BQ) and thematic block quiz (TBQ), were elaborated making use…

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…

The aim of this study is to develop and apply a rubric to evaluate the solutions proposed for questions about electromagnetic induction belonging to university second year pre-service teachers. In this study which has pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design with control group, teaching of the topic of electromagnetic induction was applied to…

The General Biology-Measuring Achievement and Progression in Science (GenBio-MAPS) assessment measures student understanding of the "Vision and Change" core concepts at the beginning, middle, and end of undergraduate biology degree programs. Assessment coordinators typically administer this instrument as a low-stakes assignment for which…

Exams constitute the predominant form of summative assessment in undergraduate biology education, with the assumption that exam performance should reflect student conceptual understanding. Previous work highlights multiple examples in which students can answer exam problems correctly without the corresponding conceptual understanding. This…

In this paper, we report an exploratory investigation of the types of assessment in a variety of high school subjects that best predicted subsequent success at university in those subjects. In social sciences and the humanities, internal (school-based) assessment was a better predictor of university success than external, examination-based…

The purpose of this paper was to give a demonstration of the primary materials and methods we used in learning communities (LCs) for biology students. The LCs were based on the performance pyramid theoretical structure. The objectives were to show the pedagogical links biological and mathematical concepts through cocurricular projects; assess…

Current initiatives to transform undergraduate STEM education in the United States advocate for the use of multidimensional learning, wherein instruction provides opportunities for students to gain competency with fundamental or cross-disciplinary concepts and practices. To achieve this goal, the discipline-based education research (DBER)…

Physics educators keep adding many skill developments to science and engineering students during their education as individuals and groups including critical thinking, conceptual understanding, problem-solving, mathematical implementation, computational implementation, etc. Here, we are discussing how to reach and analyse students' outcomes within…

This study investigated the effect of different assessment types on overall success in an online geoscience course covering energy's impact on the environment. Two groups took either the slower 1-credit or the faster 3-credit version of the course, which utilized the same content. Self-assessment questions developed using H5P, quizzes, summative…

Scientific abilities rubrics developed at Rutgers University are an assessment and self-assessment tool. They consist of tables, each representing a broad scientific ability (for example, "to collect and analyze data"), the listing of subabilities (for example, "independent and dependent variables are identified") and the…