#112: Evaluating for Ideas: A Method for Scoring Fine-Grained Analyses in Chemistry Assessment

Understanding how students organize their ideas is a central concern in chemistry education research. Chemistry students coordinate abstract ideas from multiple levels of behavior to explain how a complex system of particles results in observable behavior. While fine-grained constructivist perspectives offer an analytic framework for identifying organizing knowledge structures, researchers sometimes abandon this perspective and adopt more deficit-oriented frameworks when interested in comparing the quality of student responses. The current work presents a method for assigning a composite quality score based on numbers of unique, scientifically valid ideas expressed and the connections drawn between them. This approach uses a syntax-based method to unitize distinct ideas as well as identify and quantify links between them. Preliminary analyses demonstrate that this approach captured the richness, organization, and scoring of students’ reasoning. These findings have implications for how researchers and practitioners assess conceptual understanding and track the reorganization of ideas over time.