Background: Process skills such as critical thinking and information processing are commonly stated outcomes for STEM undergraduate degree programs, but instructors often do not explicitly assess these skills in their courses. Students are more likely to develop these crucial skills if there is constructive alignment between an instructor's intended learning outcomes, the tasks that the instructor and students perform, and the assessment tools that the instructor uses. Rubrics for each process skill can enhance this alignment by creating a shared understanding of process skills between instructors and students. Rubrics can also enable instructors to reflect on their teaching practices with regard to developing their students' process skills and facilitating feedback to students to identify areas for improvement. Results: Here, we provide rubrics that can be used to assess critical thinking and information processing in STEM undergraduate classrooms and to provide students with formative feedback. As part of the Enhancing Learning by Improving Process Skills in STEM (ELIPSS) Project, rubrics were developed to assess these two skills in STEM undergraduate students' written work. The rubrics were implemented in multiple STEM disciplines, class sizes, course levels, and institution types to ensure they were practical for everyday classroom use. Instructors reported via surveys that the rubrics supported assessment of students' written work in multiple STEM learning environments. Graduate teaching assistants also indicated that they could effectively use the rubrics to assess student work and that the rubrics clarified the instructor's expectations for how they should assess students. Students reported that they understood the content of the rubrics and could use the feedback provided by the rubric to change their future performance. Conclusion:The ELIPSS rubrics allowed instructors to explicitly assess the critical thinking and information processing skills that they wanted their students to develop in their courses. The instructors were able to clarify their expectations for both their teaching assistants and students and provide consistent feedback to students about their performance. Supporting the adoption of active-learning pedagogies should also include changes to assessment strategies to measure the skills that are developed as students engage in more meaningful learning experiences. Tools such as the ELIPSS rubrics provide a resource for instructors to better align assessments with intended learning outcomes.

Several active-learning pedagogies involve groups of students working together to construct their own understanding of course content. In these classrooms, the instructor serves as a facilitator of learning, by interacting with every group, engaging students in discussions, answering questions, and providing formative feedback. This type of interaction can be challenging for instructors in large enrollment classes. The use of undergraduate teaching assistants (TAs) during active-learning "lecture" periods is an effective way to provide an active-learning experience to a large group of students. Most undergraduate students have little to no experience with facilitating active-learning environments. Therefore, it is important to provide a thorough TA training experience in order for TAs to be effective in an active-learning classroom. Using an iterative design process, several successful strategies were developed to help prepare undergraduate TAs to assist in facilitating a large organic chemistry active-learning class. These methods ensured that TAs were knowledgeable about the content, could address questions effectively, and could provide formative feedback to students. TAs reported that these training methods were instrumental in improving their classroom facilitation and understanding of chemistry content.

Dr. Cole earned a B.A. in chemistry from Hendrix College, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physical chemistry from the University of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on issues related to how students learn chemistry and how that guides the design of instructional materials and teaching strategies as well on efforts related to faculty development and the connection between chemistry education research and the practice of teaching.

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Many students fail to develop a conceptual understanding of organic chemistry. Evidence suggests this failure goes hand-in-hand with a failure to grasp the techniques, meaning, and usefulness of curved arrow notation. Use of curved arrow notation to illustrate electrophilic addition appears to be a critical juncture in student understanding. Misconceptions arise because electrophilic addition is the first reaction where the curved arrow shows electrons from a pi bond forming a new bond that does not originate from a specific atom. This article describes a new technique (bouncing curved arrows) that addresses this stumbling block by designating which alkene carbon makes a bond to the electrophile. By removing this stumbling block and replacing it with a clear demonstration of the utility of curved arrows to describe regiochemistry of organic reactions, we encourage students to use curved arrows rather than rote memorization to deal with subsequent mechanisms. Student and faculty survey data are provided as evidence that both groups find bouncing curved arrows useful for describing electrophilic addition reactions, as well as electrophilic aromatic substitution reactions and carbocation rearrangements.