This project is carrying out a needs analysis within the community of chemical educators at the college level in order to identify the level of understanding of educational measurement and assessment by this community. The results are expected to elucidate fruitful avenues for future professional development activities within this field. The analysis is being carried out in two stages. In the first stage, focus group level work allows the setting of parameters for larger scale survey work and thus allows for the development of broader survey tools for the second phase. For this second phase a field survey is used to conduct a needs analysis that measures the gap within the community between current educational practices related to assessment and a more thorough understanding of assessment within chemistry. This phase utilizes random stratified samples of instructors in terms of both institutional type and years of experience teaching chemistry. With this strategy, factors that influence how people learn about educational tools are able to be identified. The intellectual merit of this project lies along three vectors. First, research to be done with focus groups provides a qualitative-level description of the gap between current knowledge and some definable ideal state of knowledge about assessment methodology. This research can identify ways that larger scale survey work can be conducted and sets an initial level of expectation about the nature of faculty knowledge of educational measurement. Second, the large scale field survey requires the development of tools that allow the assessment of needs when the target audience is potentially unfamiliar with not only the utility of the material but even the vocabulary commonly used. Finally, the analysis of the large-scale needs assessment survey is expected to provide a snapshot of where the chemistry education community is in terms of understanding of assessment methodologies and limitations. This snapshot, for a large educational community, can serve as a prototype for understanding the professional development needs of related communities - in other scientific disciplines and at other levels of chemistry education. The broader impact of this work derives primarily from the scale of the project and the nature of the needs being assessed. College-level instruction is largely carried out by faculty with little formal training in educational topics, including assessment. Chemistry represents a typical community in this respect, so results from this study are likely to provide (a) models for understanding professional development needs in other science fields; (b) hypotheses for designing appropriate professional development materials and conducting meaningful assessment of their efficacy and; (c) insight into how researchers in related STEM fields may conduct similar needs assessments. A broad spectrum of factors that potentially influence faculty awareness of educational tools (in this case for assessment) is anticipated to be identified. Knowing these factors is likely to be useful to others in developing templates for assessing needs of chemists and other scientists related to any educational methodology.
