Personal response systems are quickly becoming indispensable formative assessment tools in many college-level chemistry courses. By using such devices, students are provided with invaluable insights into the skills perceived by the instructor as important, while concurrently, the instructor can gather feedback as to how well students have mastered those skills. In graphically intensive subjects such as chemistry, however, their use is severely limited by the input options afforded by current devices. It is often difficult to distill graphing and structure creation tasks into questions that can be answered with short strings of numbers or via multiple choice. The iRespond system is addressing this critical formative assessment need. Using the innovative touch interface of Apple's iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch, students are drawing graphs and structures using their fingers as input devices in response to questions provided by the instructor. Similar to traditional personal response systems, the answers are being collated and displayed graphically for the instructor who can modify instruction as needed. The suite of tools being developed has broad appeal as instructors strive to improve their students' understanding of chemistry by expanding the types of questions they can ask of their students. iRespond's question creation system is providing users with a convenient method of creating questions that have been custom-tailored to meet the needs of their students and the online repository is providing users access to an ever-expanding clearinghouse of questions developed by others. Because of this inherent flexibility, iRespond can easily be adapted for use in other science, engineering, or mathematics courses.
