A Chronology of Assessment in Chemistry Education

Chemists have published data about their assessment practices since the early 1920s. What to assess and how to assess remained largely unchanged for more than 50 years. As chemistry education research emerged as a distinct subdiscipline of chemistry, assessment provided intriguing data regarding errors in student thinking and launched new lines of research into measuring student thinking. In the last few decades, discipline-specific tools have been developed to measure both cognitive and affective learning in chemistry. Ensuring the reliability and validity of data remain important benchmarks in the discipline. A chronology of assessment in chemistry education over the last 90 years (1924-2013), including its role in chemistry education reform and challenges for the future, is discussed.