<br/>Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs), such as the muddiest point activities can be leveraged to provide equitable student participation and real-time assessment of the learning progress in STEM classrooms. In addition, instructors can gauge the areas of student struggle and adapt the instruction to address the identified gaps in learning, in real-time. In muddiest point activities, students write down the concepts they are confused about which, in turn, are reviewed by the instructor to enable the closing of the identified gaps. Implementing the muddiest point activities focused on student-generated responses can, however, be daunting in large class sizes. Consequently, the adopted popular model focuses on the short cycle—asking about the areas of confusion at the end of the lesson, and the instructor's pre-chosen topics. Using a quasi-experimental design, we investigated the effects of infusing the muddiest point activities, implemented at the end of each chapter (medium cycle), with the usual common formative assessments (FAs) on performance scores in the General Chemistry 1 lecture course. One group of students (treatment group) was exposed to the muddiest point and the common FAs, whereas another group was exposed to the common FAs alone (comparison group). Results indicated that the treatment group performed significantly (<i>p</i> &lt;.05) better on all three in-term exams than the comparison group. Additionally, the treatment group performed slightly better than the comparison group in the final cumulative exam, but the mean difference was not statistically significant (p &gt;.05). Results from the general linear model further revealed that minority, minority first-generation, and female first-generation students in the treatment group performed significantly better than their peers in the comparison group. The findings imply that muddiest point activities can improve student performance in General Chemistry, especially the marginalized groups. Detailed results will be discussed.

Muddiest point activities can improve the performance of marginalized student populations in general chemistry

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