Principal Investigator: Christopher Eckdahl, Lecturer in Chemistry
Summary: Online and interrupted learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has led to decreases in high school students’ performance on standardized tests across all subjects and to decreases in their self-reported academic self-efficacy. Many students who experienced learning disruptions in high school are now in college, and future classes of college students will have experienced similar disruptions in earlier years. Higher education instructors, including those in chemistry, have felt that students struggle in ways that they did not use to and attribute this perceived change to COVID-related learning disruptions. However, no quantitative study has identified this effect in introductory chemistry, likelydue to the statistical challenge of isolating COVID-related discrepancies from other year-to-year changes in exam scores. This study proposes to surmount this statistical challenge by using Columbia’s large population of nontraditional students as an internal control. Specifically, the change in traditional vs. nontraditional exam performance will be compared for pre-2020 and post-2020 iterations of General Chemistry. Past years’ questions will be coded based on content, math or reading requirement, and complexity. Specific skills that have been strongly impacted by COVID-related learning disruption will then be identified and could be the targets of future curricular interventions.