Best Practices for Question Prompt Design of Creative Exercise Assessments in a Two-Semester Organic Chemistry Sequence

Creative exercises (CEs) are open response-style questions where students must list as many correct, relevant, and distinct statements as they can about a given prompt. In this study, students in a two-semester organic chemistry sequence were given CEs as part of recurring assessments for the course. Student response types were placed into one of three categories – basic, standard, or advanced – based on the extent to which CE statements revealed meaningful concept linking and included deeper explanations. Results show that a majority of students fell into the standard category with limited distribution in the advanced and basic categories. Minimal movement across category types was observed over time. Additionally, analysis of prompt design indicates that asking students to write statements about simple structures were less effective at eliciting detailed statements that reflect concept linking than prompts that asked students to analyze two related structures or synthetic transformations. We also identify the critical role of defining and rigorously evaluating the relevance criterion of CEs in the context of organic chemistry and offer several best practices to guide CE implementation in organic chemistry courses. Overall, creative exercises can be easily implemented into exams across a course sequence, providing instructors with valuable insight and an opportunity to address student misconceptions and knowledge-building in class.