Highlighting JChemEd: Using Connected Chemistry as a Formative Assessment

By AACTconnect on August 29, 2017


AACT recently announced that in partnership with ACS Publications, members now have access to 25 articles a year from ACS Journals, including the Journal of Chemical Education. Each month, we will highlight one article that you may consider downloading using this new member benefit. This month, we are featuring an article from the Journal of Chemical Education titled, Development of the Connected Chemistry as Formative Assessment Pedagogy for High School Chemistry Teaching.

The study described in this article used computer models to help students make connections between macroscopic, microscopic, and chemical symbols for ten common high school chemistry topics. The article describes how employing computer models as formative assessments and then using the results to differentiate individual learning helped high school students to better understand and make connections between macroscopic, particle, and drawn representations of chemical phenomena. Each of the three pedagogies have previously been studied individually to investigate their effect on student learning, but this study was the first to combine them.The results of the study found a positive impact on student understanding when computer models are used as formative assessments.

You can learn more about the Connected Chemistry Curriculum from two webinars in our archive:

  • As a follow up, we had Tina Sabatello present The Connected Chemistry Curriculum (CCC) in Action webinar in April 2015. She teacher shared how she uses the CCC to teach topics including reactions, gases, acids/bases, and buffers. She also discussed how to work around technology limitations.

To learn more about the Connected Chemistry Curriculum, and download student materials, please visit connchem.org. Additionally, if you’d like to try adding computer simulations as formative assessments to your curriculum, AACT has several simulations available for classroom use. The simulations are unlocked resources that can be used by you and by your students. Each simulation has an accompanying lesson plan with a teacher guide and student activity sheet that is available to download as a Word or PDF document for AACT members.