Student responses

It is our experience that to the first question, the most common student response is something akin to Because my teacher told me so . One is tempted to say that it is a pity that the scientific belief of so mat r students is sourced from an authority, rather than from empirical evidence - except that when chemists are asked question (ii), they find it not at all easy to answer. There is, after all, no single defining experiment that conclusively proves the claim, even though it was the phenomenon of Brownian motion that finally seems to have clinched the day for the atomists 150 or so years ago. Of course, from atomic forced microscopy (AFM), we see pictures of gold atoms being manipulated one by one - but the output from AFM is itself the result of application of interpretive models. 

Students responses to the 15 items were analysed to identify any patterns of conceptions that could emerge in their use of the triplet relationship. In general, students in the alternative instractional programme displayed a high level of proficiency in the use of the triplet relationship though several student conceptions were evident despite the emphasis that was placed to facilitate their understanding of the triplet relationship. This outcome was not unexpected as student conceptions, by nature, are often resistant to instruction (Bodner, 1986). 

Student response descriptors were provided to the students by the instructors. 

One of the most important advantages of computers in education is the capacity of software to adjust the pace or nature of activities on the basis of input from the student. Tutorial or drill and practice programs available today do in fact make some adjustments based upon student responses. These programs are... 

To determine how best to present green chemistry to students, it would be best to look at attitudes. A study reports on the relationship between attitudinal factors and student academic success in first-year chemistry courses. The study includes a comparison of attitudes toward chemistry of first-year medical students at two universities. Students from these two institutions differ considerably with respect to educational backgrounds. In the investigation, attitudes toward science (particularly chemistry) were correlated not only with students academic achievement, but also with personal demographic data, such as matriculation results, parents educational level, and location of high school. The students responses to an opinion survey suggest a substantial relationship between attitudes and academic achievement. The results also suggest that academic achievement in chemistry is more dependent on attitudes toward science than aptitudes of students (Cukrowska et al., 1999). 

You should evaluate your students preparation for the physical chemistry course. Most people agree that today s students are less well prepared than students of a few decades ago, but the students still come to you with widely varying preparation and abilities both in mathematics and in chemistry. Furthermore, their proposed career paths do not necessarily correlate with their preparation. I found it helpful to pass out a take-home orientation quiz on the first day of class. This quiz contained a few mathematics problems, a few physics and chemistry questions, a request for a list of all of the science and mathematics courses taken, and a request for a statement of the student s proposed career. Analysis of the students responses could be used in planning the course. 

A dominant theme in the data was the expectation that the students would be provided with numerical examples. A sample of student responses that address this issue, which were all collected within two days of each other during the first month of the semester, are given below. 

The norming data for all the physical chemistry examinations is now available online at the Examinations Institute web site (22). In addition to the norms themselves, it is now possible to enter student response data following taking the examination for comparison with pre-existing data for other schools. Professors will be able to quickly determine how well their students perform relative to their peers at other institutions. 

Bunce, D. M., J. R. VandenPlas, and K. L. Havanki (2006) Comparing the effectiveness on student achievement of a student response system versus online WebCT quizzes. Journal of Chemical Education 83(3), 488—493. 

Hall, R. H., M. L. Thomas, H. L. Collier, and M. G. Hilgers (2005) A student response system for increasing engagement, motivation, and learning in high enrollment lectures. Proceedings of the Eleventh Americas Conference on Information Systems, Omaha, NE, August 11-14,2005. 

Preszler, R. W., A. Dawe, C. B. Shuster, and M. Shuster (2007) Assessment of the effects of student response systems on student learning and attitudes over a broad range of biology courses. CBE Life Sciences Education 6(1), 29-41. 

These experiments are based on methods actually applied or developed for instruction by the two authors during their careers in the radiochemistry laboratory. Each experiment has been tested by students in an academic laboratory setting. The experiments were practice-taught for one semester to a group of graduate chemistry students. The students responses were then used to modify the presentation of the experiments for inclusion in this manual. 

In all such computations, it can be expected that the accuracy of the calculated results will generally improve with an increase in the size of the basis set and in the level of the calculation. However, this improvement often comes at considerable increase in computation time, so explorations of basis set and level effects are probably best done as class projects, with each student responsible for one or two calculations. The grid below gives a... 

Section 4. NAEP 8th grade Prompts, Student Responses from the 1998 Writing Assessment Tests, plus Scorers Commentaries... 

Read the prompts, eighth grade student responses, and scorers commentaries, all from NAEP s writing assessment tests. The commentaries should help you understand the language of rubrics as interpreted by very important people national scorekeepers ... 

The following are actual student responses to the question Why is it necessary to balance chemical equations ... 

To obtain student opinion on the research paper, an additional question relating to it was added to end-of-the-term course evaluation. Student response to the research paper was very favorable, since 79.2% felt the essay on green chemistry/environmental issues was a worthwhile and useful learning experience. 

These student responses represent the core goals of green chemistry ... 

Notice that these exercises have the three-part window design described earlier, with the top portion reserved for instructions or feedback, the middle containing the current story or problem, and the lowermost reserved for student response. For the mapping exercises, the lower portion of the window contains a diagram. To make a response, the student selects a part of the story or problem text and places it in the diagram. (Exact technical details of response and feedback are described later in this chapter.)... 

PSE offers even less feedback than SPS, and it is clear from student responses to the system that they do not desire more feedback than PSE provides. Most students using PSE eventually correct their own mistakes. Sometimes this correction is immediate, but it often is delayed. Were the system to point out errors at the time of commission, the students would be denied the rewards of correctly monitoring their own problem solving. 

An example of how confusions are manifested in students responses is given in Figure 7.3. Two student networks are presented in this figure. Both students encoded a relatively large amount of information from the instruction compared with other students in the experiment, but it is clear from the figure that they recalled different elements of information. The remembered ele-... 

A general pattern of encoding was apparent from the students responses. If students had abstract knowledge, they always seemed to use it in preference to giving example details. That is, their initial responses were generalizations, but when prompted for more information, they were usually able to provide example details to support their abstract descriptions. In contrast, several students described the situations only in terms of the examples. When prompted, they were unable to embellish their descriptions by using abstract characterizations. We recorded a number of instances in which the abstract information was followed by an example but never observed the opposite case of an example followed by abstract information. 

Each student worked independently in SPS. All instruction was delivered by computer, and all student responses were made with the mouse. Additional experimental materials included a paper-and-pencil questionnaire administered 2 weeks after the instructional sessions and two sets of 20 story problems. Table 9.1 contains one of the problem sets. The second was an analogous set that used matching but slightly different stories. These problems were used in the three classification tasks described below. 

Students in Experiment I also responded to a paper-and-pencil test at the conclusion of the study, and their performance can similarly be compared to the schema measures. Unfortunately, some student responses to the later exercises - from which the planning variables are derived - were irretrievably lost due to computer malfunction. As a consequence, these data are not as complete as those for Experiment II. Nevertheless, we still find a significant relationship between schema measures and posttest performance, with a best model of... 

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