College of Arts & Sciences

Peter Lam

College of Arts & Sciences Chemistry

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Daniel King Chemistry

The Study of Undergraduate Chemistry Classroom Assistance Tools

Chemistry is known by many to be one of the most difficult STEM fields. Due to this difficulty, many classroom assistance materials have been developed in order to combat the issue. The purpose of this study was to look into the data associated with the use of those classroom assistance tools used by professors in the general chemistry sequence (CHEM 101 and CHEM 102) at Drexel University. The tools looked at were clickers, post laboratory questions, online homework data, and recitation questions. The study of data was divided into two parts, with the first part being comparing exam performance related to the questions that appeared on clickers, post laboratory evaluations, and recitations. The second part was looking at the time spent on online homework questions and the percentage of clicker questions answered. It was found that student performance on the exam questions that were similar to the questions answered using the listed classroom assistance tools was higher compared to the questions that were not similar to the classroom assistance tools. It was also found that the higher the clicker participation, the stronger the exam performance.