AP Chemistry Unit 5 Mastery Checks

Are your students experiencing difficulty mastering the topics in AP Chemistry? Are you finding it difficult for to assess student understandings, especially with large classes?

With these Mastery Checks, concepts in the AP Chemistry CED are assessed with a very brief quiz, approximately 3-5 questions long and requiring 5-10 minutes to complete. These Mastery Checks use a mix of MCQ and easy-to-grade FRQ style questions, allowing students to demonstrate their understanding in a variety of ways, with the added benefit for teachers to still give timely feedback. If students are struggling, you can intervene quickly, rather than having students struggle on a larger quiz or unit test.

What's included:

Link to a google drive folder including the topic and the associated KEY (separate files).

Ideas for implementation:

• Warm ups
• Exit ticket
• Self-pacing Mastery Checks
• Review packets
• ...Your own idea!

Background for this resource (feel free to apply it in any way you choose!): In my classes, I run a "self-paced" curriculum (based on the approach from www.modernclassrooms.org), allowing students to complete assignments at their own speed within a set amount of class days. After students complete a worksheet, a few book questions, and watch lecture videos on each topic, they are required to demonstrate their mastery of the learning objectives. This is the tool I use to do that.

Grading: Again, feel free to do things your own way, but I typically count each question as one point. If a student gets 70% or greater, I mark them as "Mastered" and they can move on to the next Mastery Check when they are ready. If a student gets a lower score, I ask them to revise their work. This gives them an opportunity to identify learning gaps, review their notes, and try again. I use a "Mastery" category in my grade book for these assignments. If they get mastery I give them full credit. Their grade in this category is thus based on how many Mastery Checks they complete in a unit (ideally all of them).

Other info: Our textbook is Zumdahl, S. S., Zumdahl, S. A., & DeCoste, D. J. (2017). Chemistry (10th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage. The multiple choice questions are somewhat based on this book, but were specifically chosen to apply with the AP curriculum, as that book is not arranged in the same format as the CED. For instance, the multiple choice questions in Topic 1.8 come from both Chapter 7 and Chapter 8.