Background

There is a question category, chemical reactions, that has appeared on the Advanced Placement Chemistry Test for 40 years. We are trying to improve performance on this question -- where scores tend to be very low. To that end, we are conducting research at this site.

We have taken all of the prior exams, put these questions on the WWW, and make them available. Students can get an array of 8 items that will, nearly always, reflect the kind of item distribution that will appear on an AP test.

Last year we had:

• Nearly 20,000 hits
• 3000 hits the week before the test
• 1300 hits the day before the test

Obviosuly, if performances are to improve, students need to get to this site quite a bit sooner than they are.

We learned that students use this throughout the day, implying during school and after school access.

This Talk Illustrates:

• automatic testing, which has enormous potential implications for teaching
• a Web research strategy

This paper was prepared expressly for this talk. The links in it are internal -- and fake. They go to real papges. The site actually calculates pages.

Connect to real site, and let me explore.

Talk site.

Start -- first time user or returning user

Informed Consent page

Decline page

First Time page

Access page, data collection

Record interpretation

Typical test page

Answers page

Tutoring page

Research data

Schematic