The project is completing several tasks that will improve assessment practices for chemistry education. Testing programs that have existed via the American Chemical Sociey (ACS) Exams Institute have long allowed chemistry instructors to compare students to national norms. This project is augmenting this level of information by also analyzing the content of ACS Exams against a mapping of the content domain of the subject using a template of anchoring concepts that recur throughout the undergraduate curriculum. Alignment research then uses this analysis to provide instructors with enhanced information about what chemistry students know about such topics as chemical bonding, chemical reactions, molecular structures and chemical equilibrium and several others. Both the process of mapping the content domain and aligning test questions to this mapped domain provide significant research challenges and advance the intellectual merit of this project. The ACS Exams Institute provides exams used by over 100,000 students annually, and the Chemistry Pathway of the National Science Digital Library, ChemED DL, is also a partner on this project, so the broad impact includes not only ACS Exams but also test questions available via ChemED DL. The other key component is the porting of ACS Exams materials to an electronic delivery platform. This process provides more than enhanced access because the instant data collection afforded by electronically delivered exams improves all facets of the data analysis, including the traditional norm-referenced information and the criterion-referenced information relating test questions to the anchoring concepts of the content domain.
