Student-curated exhibitions: Alternative assessment in chemistry education in Israel

The chapter describes a reform in the Israeli education system that has significantly influenced chemistry teaching and learning. In this reform 30% of the final high-school chemistry grade was replaced by alternative assessment methods. These new standards of the nation-wide evaluation left the teachers with a great challenge, since they have neither knowledge about alternative assessment nor the experience to use it. In order to meet the chemistry teachers' needs, a professional development (PD) course was developed, emphasizing the use of student-curated exhibitions as an example of the alternative assessment method. This chapter describes the professional development course and includes a description of its different components. A research study that was conducted captured the teachers' perspectives regarding the use of student-curated exhibitions for alternative assessment. Teachers' challenges are described as well as the way they realize the advantages of using this approach and its adaptation to their school culture after they had an opportunity to self-curate an exhibition in the course. We found that the need to replace the evaluation methods encourages the chemistry teachers to deepen their knowledge of evaluation and assessment, and to understand the limitations and advantages of traditional evaluation and alternative assessment. Teachers also realized the strong reciprocal connection between the three components: teaching, learning, and evaluation.