Title: “Threshold” versus “Mastery” Knowledge: A New Way to Teach and Assess First-Year Chemistry
Year: 2018
Project overview: We don’t know what our students know. Under a ‘traditional’ model of first year university teaching, a passing student (one with a mark of 50%) might have excellent knowledge of one syllabus area (e.g. organic chemistry) but have little or no understanding in another area (e.g. thermodynamics). This disparity leads to problems in higher years – not just in chemistry courses but in others too – where lecturers need to ‘re-teach’ first year material because students have a random assortment of knowledge instead of a common threshold level of knowledge. We want to solve this problem, and we want to do it in a way that resonates with today’s students who expect a blended and personalised learning environment.
We propose an innovative approach to teaching and assessment that we are calling “‘Threshold’ vs. ‘Mastery’”. In this new model, the syllabus is split (50:50 in terms of content) into ‘threshold’ and ‘mastery’ topics. The ‘threshold’ topics are taught through adaptive online lessons, where students can work at their own pace while receiving personalised, formative feedback. The ‘threshold’ learning outcomes are continuously assessed via weekly online quizzes (reinforced by invigilated quad-weekly tests that allow us to validate that the online quizzes were indeed each student’s own work). When a student has gained a perfect score in all of the weekly quizzes, and has passed all of the validation tests, they are awarded the ‘Threshold Knowledge Badge,’ which is a hurdle task for the course. The challenging ‘mastery’ topics are taught face-to-face, through modern workshop-style lectorials that incorporate student-driven, collaborative learning activities to additionally foster a wide range of professional skills (e.g. communication, teamwork, critical thinking) that graduates require in the modern workplace. The ‘expert’ topics are assessed in an end-of-semester exam (worth 50% of the theory component), allowing students to earn merit grades. Students know that they have already passed the course before they sit the exam.
This new model will have several important benefits. Students’ learning outcomes will be improved, not just in terms of a broad and consistent syllabus coverage, but also in terms of long-term retention of knowledge. When designing the course, we can align the ‘threshold’ topics with the list of Threshold Learning Outcomes (TLOs) that has recently been published by the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, allowing us to guarantee – for the first time – that our graduates have the required attributes of a chemistry major. Finally, the granularity of the data on student performance will enable us to give each student a detailed, personalised ePortfolio of their knowledge.
