I A Comparison of the Achievement of

I Secondary School Students

Sldney P. Harris1 John Bowne H. S.

Flushing. N Y 11367 Anthony A. Galltsls2

Sleepy Hollow High School North Tarrytown, N Y 10591

On May 31, 1979, the Education Committee of the New York Section, ACS gave an examination wine the General

College Students, Advanced Placement Students, and First-Year Chemistry

Chemistry 1977 ACS Examination to 778 secondary school students. Of these. 602 were completing one year of secondary school chemistry and the remaking f76 &dents had coG- pleted an additional year of advanced placement chemistry. These examinations involved only the first 70 questions and all were of the multiple-choice type. All students were allowed the reouired 100 min and all students took the examinations simultaneously in one center in each of the eleven counties within the jurisdiction of the New York Section.

Each school entering the competition was permitted to enter its five best students in each of the two categories, first year or advanced placement chemistry.

The examinations were eraded electronicallv. The mean " grade for the students with &e year of chemistrybas 30.5 with Y a standard deviation, a, of 8.58. The mean made for students

who had completed an additional year of advanced placement chemistry was 43.7 with u of 10.5.

Extensive statistical treatment of a group of 1972 students C from 28 institutions had been used in establishing norms for H the General Chemistry 1977 Examination. These students had

0 a mean of 36.3 with u of 11.1 for the first 70 questions of the examination.

O The range of grades for the three types of students was 65 L to 12 for the college group, 66 to 15 for the advanced placement

students, and 61 to 8 for the students having one year of sec-

Table 1. Topics and Dldrlbutlon of Ouestlons

Number ot Sectim Topic Ouestiom,

1 Slolohiometly 01 Reactions 6 2 Struchxe, Bonding. Periodicily 13

and GBDmeby of MoI~~des 3 States ot Maner 8 4 Acid-Base Chemistry and 10

Solution Stoichiometry 5 Equiilbria: Homogeneous 5

and Heterogeneous 6 Elechochemistry and Redox 6 7 Thmchemistry. Thermodynamics 6

and Kinetics of Reactions 8 Descriptive Chemistry 12 9 Carbon Chemistry 4

Total 70

Table 2. Comparative Results lor All Groups

Adv. Placement ACS Norm First Year Chemistry Seotlon ~ e a n t Group Mean Mean t

1 3.92 2.2 3.04 2.56 -1.99. 2 8.24 2.0 7.11 6.64 -0.11. 3 5.21 5.3 3.96 3.69 -0.6P 4 7.04 4.1 5.81 4.43 -4.8 5 3.42 4.5 2.48 1.93 -l.P

ondary school chemistry. 6 3.60 2.7 3.11 2.71 -1.96. The topic titles in most secondary school chemistry cur- 7 4.12 3.6 3.20 2.86 -1.4.

H ricnla are the same as those used in college general chemistry. 8 5.73 -1.r 6.24 4.17 -5.2 E Only one school known uses the CHEM Study course while 9 2.01 2.4 1.46 1.45 -0.033'

the others use a diluted form of this course with simpler lah- not ~ i g n n i ~ ~ n l oratorv experiments. A studv of the ouestions in this exami- - .

I nation showed that 41 of thequestio& could be answered by S a trulv outstandine secondaw school first vear student. Thus. - T rerticcate prizes were awarded to 76 students havinggrades - from 41 to 52 on this examination. The seven students who R graded between 53 and 61 in this group were awarded in- Y scribed copies of the 59th Edition of the Handbook of

Chemistry-and Physics. The certificate winners in the ad- vanced placement group of students graded from 47 to 59 and numbered 65 students. The six advanced placement chemistry students who earned grades from 60 to 66 were also awarded inscribed conies of the same Handbook of Chemistrv and Physics.

Better comnarisons are available if studies are made of the achievement bf students on each of the nine sections of the examination. Table 1 eives thesuhiect titles and numbers of questions in each of tKese subject areas.

A typical sample of 30 students was established for each group. i'he answkr cards arranged hy school and county, were broken into packages of 100 and each pack was cut, shuffled

' Chairman, Education Committee, New York Section, ACS. Chairman, Education Committee, Nassau-Suffolk Subsection

of New York Section, ACS. aRagsdale, R.O., McKean, F. L., and Christiansen, M. M., J.

CHEM. EDUC., 55,253 (1978).

and intermixed for a period of 30 min. These cards were then numbered consecutively from 1 to 602 for the first year stn- dents. A TI-58 calculator and its associated PC-100 printer were used to generate and record 70 random numbers between 1 and 602. From these, random cards were drawn and it was determined that the mean and the standard deviation for the whole examination varied hut slightly whether 30,40, 50 or 60 randomly selected papers were used. The 30 students se- lected for each of the two secondary school categories were graded in each of the subject areas of the examination.

Table 2 shows the superiority of the advanced placement students for all aspects of the examination except in the area of Descriptive Chemistry. In order to investigate the superi- ority in terms of significance, t tests were applied to every section of the examination. A value for t of 2.045 or greater establishes a significance level of 5.000 X or the 95.00% confidence level. Using only two significant figures it is seen that the superiority of the advanced placement students over the ACS norm group is significant in eight of the nine sections of the examination. In section 8, the slight superiority of the ACS norm group is not significant.

The 0.51 difference between the means for the advanced placement and the ACS norm group is surprising in view of the fact that Descriptive Chemistry is not part of the Ad-

484 / Journal of Chemical Education

vanced Placement Syllahus. The signifcant superiority of the advanced placement students in Section 9 of the examination is also unexpected because all advanced placement chemistry teachers known to the authors teach little carhon chemistry except for the influence that structure and intermolecular bonding have on the melting points of carhon compounds.

On the other hand, the superiority of advanced placement students is expected. In general, they are good to excellent studentss, and they represent the best five students in each advanced placement class. The ACS norm group represents a greater diversity of ahility in that it includes a complete distribution of college students taking general chemistry.

The 1977 ACS norm group is sbperior to the first-year secondary school chemistry group in every area except for the almost identical result in the last or Carbon Chemistry section of the examination. However, in only sections 4 and 8 of the examination are the superiorities on a statistically significant level.

These secondary school students have high ahility. How- ever, the lack of more significant superiority of the college students is surprising because first year secondary school students do not study structure and the geometry of molecules nor do they study quantum numbers. In section 3 of the ex- amination, the secondary school group and the college group are almost on a par and yet the first year students in secondary schools do not study unit cells or phase diagrams, both rep-

resented in the questions. Mathematical approaches are ~ ~

generally not used in the first year courses ?wept in the area of stoichiometry. However, in this topic, simple oumhers are used.

A possihle lesson for secondary school chemistry teachers and their su~ervisors is to allow hrieht students to take honor ( : I a s s ~ ~ in chemistry. Many award winners were in this type slf class. These classes should hare morc nd\xnced work mken up. A suitable choice is the CHEM Study curriculum and this is done in onlv one case known to the authors.

We cannot believe that a secondary school student with one year of chemi$try who achieves a arade of 53 and a college student who ear& the same grade know the same amount of chemistry. Both of these grades are in the 90.7 percentile. These situations, of which there were many, should give pause in making a too literal translation into a grade.

Of great importance is the enthusiastic participation of 124 secondary schools and over 200 secondary school chemistry teachers in an ACS function. Manv teachers have asked for the continu~itim 11f this c~mpetition. We wish to thank the memh~rs (11 the Chrmical Education

Committeeofthe New York Section,l\CS and many oftheir colleagues who helped in administering the examinationi. We also wish to thank the manv memhers oiSubsections of the New York Section and the members of their education com- mittees who helped in the same way.

Volume 57, Number 7, July 1980 / 495