Organic Chemistry Language Assessment Tool (OCLAT): Student Retention of Concepts Involving Acids/Bases and Electronegativity

Organic Chemistry Language Assessment Tool: Student Retention of Concepts Involving Acids/Bases and Electronegativity 

The Organic Chemistry Language Assessment Tool (OCLAT) has been redesigned from previous years so that it can effectively assess students’ retention of four types of core organic chemistry concepts, two of which are acids/bases and electronegativity, which will be the focus of this presentation. This tool is significant because it is able to assess students’ ability to recall important relationships between core organic chemistry concepts as well as their capabilities of communicating these chemistry concepts through the use of proper language. The goal of this project was to redesign the previously created OCLAT so that it could be most effective in its assessments and so that there was no ambiguity in the questions given to students. The types of questions, cloze questions and concept maps, were restructured using past data that revealed where some problems may lie. A key hurdle to overcome was to establish the assessment in a manner that was fair to students, but not overly easy. The redesigned test not only altered previously created questions, but it also added a new content area to the tool, creating four core content areas of the OCLAT, rather than the three content areas that the previous OCLAT consisted of. This potentially improved version of the OCLAT was then given to willing students who had completed their undergraduate coursework in organic chemistry during the year of 2020. The student scores from the OCLAT and the data regarding whether or not the tool was truly improved will be shared.