High school chemistry teachers will often establish goals that guide assessment design and interpretation of assessment results. However, little is known about how these goals and the assessment design collectively guide the interpretation of results. This study seeks to better understand what teachers notice when interpreting assessment results…

Building domain knowledge is essential to a student's success in any course. Chemistry, similar to other STEM disciplines, has a strong cumulative element (i.e., topic areas continuously build upon prior coursework). We employed the testing effect, in the form of post-exam retrieval quizzes, as a way to improve students' understanding of chemistry…

Designing high school chemistry assessments is a complex and difficult task. Although prior studies about assessment have offered teachers guidelines and standards as support to generate quality assessment items, little is known about how teachers engage these supports or enact their own beliefs into practice while developing assessments.…

The aim of this study was to determine the scientific literacy skills of students at junior high school (JHS) in biology teaching in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. This research was a survey research. Sampling was selected through a progressive random sampling technique with stratification. The research samples were four junior high schools, they are:…

What we emphasize and reward on assessments signals to students what matters to us. Accordingly, a great deal of scholarship in chemistry education has focused on defining the sorts of performances worth assessing. Here, we unpack observations we made while analyzing what "success" meant across three large-enrollment general chemistry…

Large-scale assessments such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) have field trials where new survey features are tested for utility in the main survey. Because of resource constraints, there is a trade-off between how much of the sample can be used to test new survey features and how much can be used for the initial item…

Research-based assessments (RBAs) allow researchers and practitioners to compare student performance across different contexts and institutions. In recent years, research attention has focused on the student populations these RBAs were initially developed with because much of that research was done with "samples of convenience" that were…

Practice exams are a proven tool to increase retrieval of information long-term. Over a three-year period, students in Anatomy and Physiology I and II were offered practice exams as either no-stakes practice exams (years 1-2) and low-stakes practice exams (year 3). Students who took practice exams did significantly better on the actual lecture…

For decades, studies have revealed students' decreasing interest in science. Extracurricular learning opportunities--the Science Olympiads being a publicly well-known example--are an important means identified to tackle this challenge and help students further differentiate their interests. Better understanding the underlying constructs and…

Recently, Nissen et al. argued in this journal for the use of Cohen's d, in place of the more commonly used normalized gain, in the analysis of preinstruction and postinstruction scores on concept inventories used to measure the effectiveness of instruction. Their reason for advocating such a change is that they say normalized gains are…

The concept of delocalization (i.e., resonance) is fundamental concept in organic chemistry but essential learning outcomes (LOs) have not previously been proposed nor has there been an analysis of how resonance is taught, despite indications in the literature that students have many non-canonical ideas about the concepts. To address this deficit,…

The Regulations of the Commissioner of Education provide that an intermediate-level science test is to be administered in Grade 8 to serve as a basis for determining students' need for academic intervention services in science. The New York State Grade 8 Intermediate-Level Science Test consists of two required components: a Written Test and a…

The purpose of current study was to investigate the effect of conceptual change-oriented instruction accompanied by conceptual change texts enriched with concept cartoons, gender, and their interaction on primary preservice teachers' conceptual understanding and their attitudes towards simple electricity. Participants were 225 sophomores from six…

The New York State Education Department (NYSED) has a partnership with Questar Assessment Inc. (Questar) for the online delivery of the 2023 Elementary-Level (Grade 5) and Intermediate-Level (Grade 8) Science Computer-Based Field Tests. Teachers from across the State work with NYSED in a variety of activities to ensure the validity and reliability…

Nowadays, the assessment of student performance has become increasingly technology-based, a trend that can also be observed in the evaluation of scientific reasoning, with more and more of the formerly paper-based assessment tools moving into the digital space. The study aimed to examine the reliability and validity of the paper-based and…