Classroom Salon (CLS) is a social online learning platform that has been developed by educators at Carnegie Mellon University. The platform allows students to interactively comment and discuss ideas, texts, videos, news articles and other reading material. Classroom Salon has been implemented into introductory chemistry classes at UW-Milwaukee in 2012 as delivery method for content reading assignments prior to covering the content in class. Students comment and ask questions about the text, which then allows instructors to directly incorporate these comments into instruction. As part of the assigned reading, students were also asked to answer questions that were embedded in the text and which were meant to promote critical thinking skills and deeper learning. Quantitative analysis has shown that students who utilize CLS perform on average higher on the final exam than students who enrolled in a different lecture section of the course and were assigned the same reading from the textbook chapters. As an extension of this research, this project describes a more detailed analysis of specific final exam items that correlate directly with each of the ten content areas of the reading assignments, gender comparison, and ACT score comparison. Items were rated according their complexity by expert raters, compared to the questions in the reading assignments, and then student performance on these items was compared. The analysis is meant to reveal strength and shortcomings of this methodology and efficacy of the reading assignments as well as suggest possible changes to improve student course performance in the future.<br/>

Quantitative analysis of the impact of classroom salon on introductory chemistry student performance

253rd National Meeting (2017)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.