Using Student-Generated Instructional Materials in an e-Homework Platform

Feedback-driven online homework systems provide students with a comprehensive set of practice questions that can accompany and enhance other instructional resources. However, the available e-homework systems do not contain content that aligns well with our course objectives, provide too few questions in key areas, and use assessment format(s) that do not match the ones used on our exams. Motivated to create our own questions, we used this gap as an opportunity to engage students in constructing and reviewing course-aligned content within a commercial e-homework platform. The students successfully generated approximately 1,000 largely open-ended organic chemistry questions, some with mechanistic and structural drawing capabilities, by modifying old exam questions. The students’ questions spanned a variety of cognitive levels that skewed, as intended, toward skill-building. According to our assessment scheme, 75% of the questions were evaluated to be of the highest quality. As a consequence, we advocate tha...

[1]  Kate J. Graham,et al.  Synthesis Road Map Problems in Organic Chemistry. , 2014 .

[2]  Michael J. Evans,et al.  A Collaborative, Wiki-Based Organic Chemistry Project Incorporating Free Chemistry Software on the Web , 2011 .

[3]  Robert B. Grossman,et al.  EPOCH: An Organic Chemistry Homework Program that Offers Response-Specific Feedback to Students. , 2006 .

[4]  Melanie M. Cooper,et al.  Decorating with Arrows: Toward the Development of Representational Competence in Organic Chemistry , 2012 .

[5]  Gautam Bhattacharyya,et al.  "It Gets Me to the Product": How Students Propose Organic Mechanisms , 2005 .

[6]  Melanie Butler,et al.  The Use of Online Homework Systems to Enhance Out-of-Class Student Engagement , 2005 .

[7]  Gloria Gozdzik,et al.  Organic Chemistry and the Internet: A Web-Based Approach to Homework and Testing Using the WE LEARN System , 2000 .

[8]  Anthony Milanowski,et al.  Measuring and promoting inter-rater agreement of teacher and principal performance ratings. , 2012 .

[9]  R. Curtis,et al.  Student Perceptions of Online Homework Use for Formative Assessment of Learning in Organic Chemistry. , 2015, Journal of chemical education.

[10]  E. González-Mondragón,et al.  Chemical and Pharmacological Aspects of Capsaicin , 2011, Molecules.

[11]  Alison E. Kay,et al.  Student-Generated Content: Enhancing learning through sharing multiple-choice questions , 2014 .

[12]  Ramona Lundberg,et al.  Student-Generated Assessment. , 1997 .

[13]  Robert Howard,et al.  Student Attitudes to an Online, Peer-instruction, Revision Aid in Science Education , 2015 .

[14]  Paul Denny,et al.  A participatory learning approach to biochemistry using student authored and evaluated multiple‐choice questions , 2011, Biochemistry and molecular biology education : a bimonthly publication of the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

[15]  Chen-Lin C. Kulik,et al.  The Instructional Effect of Feedback in Test-Like Events , 1991 .

[16]  Benjamin S. Bloom,et al.  A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives , 2000 .

[17]  Philip A. Janowicz,et al.  Mixed-Methods Study of Online and Written Organic Chemistry Homework , 2014 .

[18]  Brian P. Coppola,et al.  Improving Science Education and Understanding through Editing Wikipedia , 2010 .

[19]  P. Baldi,et al.  Synthesis Explorer : A Chemical Reaction Tutorial System for Organic Synthesis Design and Mechanism Prediction , 2008 .

[20]  Brian P. Coppola,et al.  The University of Michigan Undergraduate Chemistry Curriculum 2. Instructional Strategies and Assessment. , 1997 .

[21]  Pratibha Varma-Nelson,et al.  PLTL: Tracking the Trajectory from Face-to-Face to Online Environments , 2013 .

[22]  M. E. Buck,et al.  Literature-Based Problems for Introductory Organic Chemistry Quizzes and Exams , 2016 .

[23]  David B. Smithrud,et al.  Pencil–Paper Learning Should Be Combined with Online Homework Software , 2015 .

[24]  Jennifer Robertson-Honecker,et al.  Online Homework, Help or Hindrance? What Students Think and How They Perform. , 2011 .

[25]  Sarah Beth Wilson,et al.  Replicating Peer-Led Team Learning in cyberspace: Research, opportunities, and challenges , 2014 .

[26]  Larry Ambrose,et al.  The power of feedback. , 2002, Healthcare executive.

[27]  Ginger V. Shultz,et al.  Eliciting Student Explanations of Experimental Results Using an Online Discussion Board , 2014 .

[28]  G. Bodner,et al.  What can we do about ‘Parker’? A case study of a good student who didn't ‘get’ organic chemistry , 2008 .

[29]  Beth Simon,et al.  Quality of student contributed questions using PeerWise , 2009, ACE '09.

[30]  Laurie L. Parker,et al.  Case Study Using Online Homework in Undergraduate Organic Chemistry: Results and Student Attitudes , 2013 .

[31]  G. Lawrie,et al.  Chemistry Vlogs: a Vehicle for Student-Generated Representations and Explanations to Scaffold their Understanding of Structure - Property Relationships , 2013 .

[32]  Simon Bates,et al.  Assessing the quality of a student-generated question repository , 2013, 1308.2202.