As a result of feedback from chemistry professors, the American Chemical Society Examinations Institute (ACS-EI) has developed the Exams Data Analysis Spreadsheet (EDAS) as a tool to help professors analyze student data from ACS exams. The EDAS will conduct calculations such as descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation, median, etc.), histograms of students’ total scores, percentiles based on the national normative dataset, difficulty & discrimination indices, and the percentage of students’ responses to individual exam questions. Since the ACS-EI acknowledges that individual professors teach different content in their classrooms, the EDAS allows professors to customize their analyses by choosing specific sets of questions that are relevant for individualized classrooms. EDAS also has the option of choosing specific sets of questions based on the Level 1 statements (<i>i.e.</i> ‘Big Ideas’) of the Anchoring Concepts Content Map. Professors may then compare their students’ results to the national normative results, which are also calculated based on the set of exam questions chosen by the professor. The EDAS is intended to be a user-friendly tool which may help professors better understand their students’ performance on ACS exams and could potentially be used as a means of programmatic assessment within chemistry departments. This presentation will provide a discussion of the development of the EDAS for the 2012 First Term General Chemistry Exam (GC12F), which includes instructor feedback during EDAS trial tests. Further, a visual demonstration of the features provided by the EDAS will be presented. Future goals include creating versions of the EDAS for multiple ACS-EI exams.

Creating the Exams Data Analysis Spreadsheet (EDAS) as a tool to help instructors conduct customizable analyses of student ACS exam data and compare the results to national normative statistics

249th National Meeting (2015)

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