Misconceptions as levels of understanding: Development of the Bonding, Structure, and Properties Assessment

The CER community has done an excellent job of documenting student misconceptions about molecular structure and polarity. The current work conceptualizes these misconceptions as series of levels of understanding that students pass through as they develop a more complete understanding of molecular structure and polarity. These levels of understanding form the basis for a proposed learning progression and the instrument used to place students on the progression. The development of the instrument was done using the Wilson Building Block Approach. Using Rasch analysis allows the structure of the progression to be investigated as well as generating interpretable measures of student understanding. The poster will describe the process used to develop the instrument and the results of the most recent large-scale data collection