The capacity to seamlessly communicate with representations is essential for chemists and chemistry learners. Kozma and Russell posited that an ability to utilize representations to think about, communicate, and create meaning for a phenomenon demonstrates representational competence. They proposed a set of skills and practices that comprise representational competence, such as the ability to interpret features of representations or use representations to make inferences. Research studies often investigate student representational competence through interviews or assignments. However, no assessment instrument currently exists that captures and measures student representational competence. In this talk, we will present the development of a formative assessment designed to measure three representational competence skills: an ability to (a) interpret, (b) translate, and (c) use common organic chemistry representations of molecular structure (condensed structures, Lewis structures, skeletal structures, dash-wedge diagrams, Newman projections, and chair conformations). Item development was informed by semi-structured interviews with 38 Organic Chemistry I students. The pilot instrument was administered to over 1000 Organic Chemistry I students. We will discuss how the qualitative data supported item design, how expert validation and item analysis informed item reduction, and how our preliminary findings contribute to an understanding of what it means to measure representational competence.

Measuring representational competence: The organic chemistry representational competence assessment (ORCA)

ACS Spring 2022

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