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 environments. We observed that students enrolled in two
of the three environments could succeed without ever connecting atomic/molecular
behavior to how and why phenomena happen. These environments, we argue,
were not really “chemistry classes” but rather opportunities
for students to gain proficiency with a jumble of skills and factual
recall. However, one of the three environments dedicated 14–57%
of points on exams to items with the potential to engage students
in using core ideas (e.g., energy, bonding interactions) to predict,
explain, or model observable events. This course, we argue, is more
aligned with the intellectual work of the chemical sciences than the
other two. If our courses assess solely (or largely) decontextualized
skills and factual recall we risk (1) gating access to STEM careers
on the basis of facility with skills most students will never use
outside the classroom and (2) never allowing students to experience
the tremendous predictive and explanatory power of atomic/molecular
models. We implore the community to reflect on whether “what
counts” in the courses we teach aligns with the performances
we actually value.