Bonding Representations Inventory (BRI)

Purpose

The BRI assesses students’ misconceptions about covalent and ionic bonding representations.

The BRI assess the following concepts:

  1. Periodic trends

  2. Electrostatic interactions

  3. Octet rule

  4. Surface features

  5. Term confusion

Population

The BRI is commonly administered in high school and college chemistry courses that teach about covalent and ionic bonding.

Typical Performance

Below are the performance results from the initial instrument development in three contexts (AP Chem, Gen Chem, and HS Chem).

Example question:

Validity

Study describing the validation process for the BRI:

  • Luxford, C. J., & Bretz, S. L. (2014). Development of the bonding representations inventory to identify student misconceptions about covalent and ionic bonding representations. Journal of Chemical Education, 91(3), 312-320.

  • Luxford, C. J., & Bretz, S. L. (2013). Moving beyond definitions: what student-generated models reveal about their understanding of covalent bonding and ionic bonding. Chemistry Education Research and Practice, 14(2), 214-222.

Research

We recommend using Google Scholar to find the most up-to-date studies that use the instrument.

Example LASSO Report

Please follow this link to our example report for concept inventories.