Advancing Equity in STEM: The Impact Assessment Design Has on Who Succeeds in Undergraduate Introductory Chemistry

What we as scientists and educators assess has a tremendous
impact
on whom we authorize to participate in science careers. Unfortunately,
in critical gateway chemistry courses, assessments commonly emphasize
and reward recall of disaggregated facts or performance of (often
mathematical) skills. Such an emphasis marginalizes students based
on their access to pre-college math preparation and misrepresents
the intellectual work of chemistry. Here, we explore whether assessing
intellectual work more authentic to the practice of chemistry (i.e.,
mechanistic reasoning) might support more equitable achievement. Mechanistic
reasoning involves explaining a phenomenon in terms of interactions
between lower scale entities (e.g., atoms and molecules). We collected
352 assessment tasks administered in college-level introductory chemistry
courses across two universities. What was required for success on
these tasks was rote math skills (165), mechanistic reasoning (36),
neither (126), or both (25). Logistic regression models predict that
the intellectual work emphasized on in an assessment could impact
whether 15–20% of the cohort passes or fails. Whom does assessment
emphasis impact most? Predicted pass rates for those often categorized
as “at-risk” could be 67 or 93%, depending on whether
their success was defined by rote calculation or mechanistic reasoning.
Therefore, assessment transformation could provide a path toward advancing
the relevance of our courses and educational equity.