Assessment, including course exams, clearly indicates to students what learning goals they are expected to master in a certain course. However, most of these assessments tend to focus on generating a correct answer rather than on the type of reasoning or skills used to arrive at the answer. If educators value skills in addition to the correctness of an answer, it is important that they assess them. As part of the ANA-POGIL (analytical process oriented guided inquiry learning) project, the ANA-POGIL team developed a set of processrich or guided-inquiry-type assessment questions to be used on exams. 2 These questions were designed to mirror the structure of the POGIL activities, where students were provided data in the form of a table, graph, or set of information with the intention of eliciting evidence of process skills such as information processing, problem solving, and critical thinking in the students’ written responses. This study presents an analysis of student responses gathered from multiple institutions over several semesters to determine characteristics of questions that are likely to elicit evidence of process skills. Results of this project can provide some insight and recommendations to instructors about how to construct questions to elicit evidence of desired skills.
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.8b00877