THE CHEM 150 story


CHEM 150 is a remedial Chemistry course for students with weak backgrounds. 233 students sat the exam in 2006 (220 in 2007) (208 in 2008) (271 in 2010).

IN 2006 : BestChoice requirement included 10 assignments (each at0.5 course marks)
In 2007: Increased BestChoice requirement by adding 6 Prelab modules.
Students are not given marks toward their course total for the Prelabs, but their supervisor checks that they have completed this and adjusts their lab mark if they have not done so.
In 2008: BestChoice requirement was reviewed. Four of the Prelab modules were changed in order to make them more directly relevant to the laboratory experiments (Experiments 2, 4, 5 and 6). Experiment 2 was made shorter and new printed page inserted to replace pre-laboratory work. Experiment 4 was a new module on Kinetics including collision theory. ExperimentTwo of the assessed modules were changed (added Lewis Structure Basics and Moles and Avogadro). Experiment 5 was a old module with a new printed page at the end. Experiment 6 was a new module about precipitation and writing equations for precipitation reactions.

Usage outcome:
Compulsory modules: Despite the higher requirement, a larger percentage of the students who sat the exam completed the compulsory work.
A correct answer in BestChoice gets a BC Mark. These are NOT the same as the course marks given for completion of modules above. In order to gain a total of 5 course marks in 2007, students had to choose the correct BestChoice answer 750 times.


Noncompulsory modules: BestChoice is a large resource and there are a significant number of modules that are not compulsory work. The increase in required work also had the effect of increasing the number of non-compulsory marks gained on average.

For CHEM 150 in Average BC marks obtained/available Average total BC marks
obtained/available
Compulsory Non-compulsory
2006 411  /   571 (74%) 90  /  1461 501 / 2032
2007 629  /  750 (85%) 189  /  1164 818  /  1914
2008 758  /  848 (90%) 205  /  1150 962  /  1998
2009 737  /  836 (88%) 261  /  1272 998  /  2108
2010 708  /  835 (85%) 231  /  1501 939  /  2336

For 2007: 98% completion for pre-labs; 83% completion of assignments

Student-entered feedback outcome:
There is a survey at the end of every module in BestChoice. Students may rate the modules (worst 1 to 6 best) and enter comments. The response rates below are based on total module completions for students in this course.

Comments: Although the response rate is somewhat lower than in 2007 due to the increased number of completed modules, the percentage of comments that were compliments is up considerably.

CHEM 150 Comments Number entered Response rate % Compliments % Criticisms % Suggestions
2006 186 9% 72 9 19
2007 257 7% 79 9 12
2008 185   77 8 15
2009 125   74 19 14
2010 156   68 22 10
Module Ratings: The response rate is somewhat lower in 2007, but the average of the ratings is significantly up, as is the % positives and the percentage of the top rating.

CHEM 150 Module ratings responses average/6 response rate* % positives (4, 5, 6) % 6's
2006 977 4.6 47% 82% 31%
2007 1286 4.9 36% 86% 41%
2008 1414 4.75 39% 84% 35%
2009 1175 4.77 81% 35%
2008 156 4.4 78% 28%
Additional evidence is that in 2007 the number of students who did over 300 pages more than doubled (14 to 34), There were 484 pages available. 178 of these were compulsory. In 2008 the number of students who did over 300 pages was 30.

Conclusions

Increasing the compulsory BestChoice requirement by 30% and then by 20%
had no effect on student satisfaction
increased % completions of compulsory modules (70 to 84 to 89%)
increased % average noncompulsory usage (18% to 25 to 21%)