This report presents a summary of a meeting on assessment of course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs), including an operational definition of a CURE, a summary of research on CUREs, relevant findings from studies of undergraduate research internships, and recommendations for future research on and evaluation of CUREs.

All that remains to be said refers to the utility of the visualizing faculty, and may be compressed into a few words. A visual image is the most perfect form of mental representation wherever the shape, position, and relations of objects in space are concerned.... The pleasure its use can afford is immense.... Our bookish and wordy education tends to repress this valuable gift of nature. A faculty that is of importance in all technical and artistic occupations, that gives accuracy to our perceptions, and justness to our generalizations, is starved by lazy disuse, instead of being cultivated judiciously in such a way as will on the whole bring the best return.

Faculty perspectives of the undergraduate chemistry laboratory were the focus of a study to articulate the goals, strategies, and assessments used in undergraduate teaching laboratories. Data were collected via semistructured interviews with faculty (N = 22) from community colleges, liberal arts colleges, comprehensive universities, and research institutions engaged in teaching or supervising undergraduate laboratories. The goals for general chemistry, organic chemistry, and upper-division laboratories are described and compared among faculty who have received NSF-CCLI (now called NSF-TUES) grants to implement changes in laboratory and those who have not. Problems and limitations to success in laboratory are also reported, and the impact of these obstacles on student achievement and laboratory curricula is discussed.

Little research exists on college students’ learning goals in chemistry, let alone specifically pertaining to laboratory coursework. Because students’ learning goals are linked to achievement and dependent on context, research on students’ goals in the laboratory context may lead to better understanding about the efficacy of lab curricula. This study characterized undergraduate students’ learning goals for general chemistry laboratory coursework by recording video of students completing laboratory experiments and interviewing the students about their experiences. The data was analyzed utilizing the framework of learning domains as described by Human Constructivism. Students were found to be primarily guided by affective goals, such as the desire to feel good by completing the requirements and getting done early. This stood in conflict with any psychomotor or cognitive goals they held concurrently. The data provide suggestions for reform of the general chemistry laboratory curriculum.

This work reports the development of a survey for laboratory goals in undergraduate chemistry, the analysis of reliable and valid data collected from a national survey of college chemistry faculty, and a synthesis of the findings. The study used a sequential exploratory mixed-methods design. Faculty goals for laboratory emerged across seven factors, four of whichresearch experience, group work, error analysis, and laboratory writingshowed significant differences by course type. Significant differences between goals were also discovered when analyzed by external funding for the laboratory versus no funding. Synthesis across the previously published qualitative study and the quantitative study reported herein yields areas of emphasis in the curriculum for specific goals. This work adds weight to the growing body of global literature that implores faculty to define and assess their goals for laboratory.

Forty chemistry faculty from American Chemical Society-approved departments were interviewed to determine their goals for undergraduate chemistry laboratory. Faculty were stratified by type of institution, departmental success with regard to National Science Foundation funding for laboratory reform, and level of laboratory course. Interview transcripts that were coded and analyzed using the lens of meaningful learning reveal the importance of cognitive and psychomotor goals relative to affective learning, particularly in organic chemistry and upper-division chemistry laboratory courses. This research reveals that the undergraduate chemistry laboratory offers multiple opportunities for faculty to articulate learning goals across the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains. Furthermore, these goals are accessible across the undergraduate chemistry curriculum from general chemistry through organic chemistry and into a wide array of upper-division laboratories. In this study, faculty showed a decreasing emphasis on affective goals in organic chemistry and upper-division courses. Whether affective goals should be a part of the organic and upper-division chemistry curriculum remains a question for faculty to discuss.

Chemistry faculty members are highly skilled in obtaining, analyzing, and interpreting physical measurements, but often they are less skilled in measuring student learning. This work provides guidance for chemistry faculty from the research literature on multiple-choice item development in chemistry. Areas covered include content, stem, and response construction; item analysis; item difficulty; and item discrimination. The goal is to help faculty construct high-quality, reliable, and valid multiple-choice items to evaluate students’ ability to meet learning objectives and to demonstrate proficiency in the content domain under study. Using item-writing guidelines based upon the research literature allows faculty to create assessments that are reliable and valid, with greater ability to discriminate between high- and low-achieving students.

Consensus does not exist among chemists as to the essential characteristics of inquiry in the undergraduate laboratory. A rubric developed for elementary and secondary science classrooms to distinguish among levels of inquiry was modified for the undergraduate chemistry laboratory. Both peer-reviewed experiments in the literature and commercially available experiments were evaluated using the rubric, revealing a diversity of uses for the word inquiry.The modified rubric provides a valid and reliable standard of measure for chemists to examine their laboratory curriculum. [Chem.