Elizabeth Reece, “Design and Validation of a Chemistry Literacy”
Mentor: Anja Blecking, Chemistry & Biochemistry, Letters & Science (College of)
Poster #147
Transitioning from high school into college-level chemistry courses can be very challenging for students, especially if they had limited exposure to science in high school. These students enter college chemistry with a disadvantage often overlooked in traditional introductory chemistry courses that only focus on teaching chemistry content. Introductory chemistry courses frequently presume students possess sufficient reading and comprehension skills. This viewpoint overlooks the complexity of chemistry texts and the cognitive load these texts impose on students. Text features, such as chemistry-specific vocabulary, chemical symbols, chemical equations, graphs, particle-level images, or macroscopic images, are meant to familiarize learners with subject-specific language. For many students, these features can be very challenging and pose a real learning barrier if paired with poor reading strategies. The new assessment tool will identify gaps in students’ chemistry literacy skills and allow instructors to provide targeted literacy support in the future. Using Bloom’s Taxonomy, the new assessment will evaluate students’ performance on the described literacy components at different learning levels. The test is validated through student test-taking and subsequent in-person interviews. The Poster # will present the design process and preliminary test validation results.