Chemistry Education Research and Practice最新文献

General chemistry is often the first course taken by students interested in STEM and health; therefore, it is considered critical for their retention in these fields. Success in these courses is shaped by multiple factors, including economic disparities, academic preparation, and both affective and cognitive dimensions. While affective measures have been increasingly studied in relation to student performance and retention, few studies have explored the interrelationships between affective variables and how they collectively influence performance or retention. Using structural equation modeling (SEM) path analysis, this study examined the connections between four early-semester affective variables (sense of belonging, academic mindset entity (fixed mindset), science resources, and imposter syndrome) and their impacts on exam performance in a large first-semester general chemistry course (N = 354). Additionally, mediation analyses were conducted to further identify indirect effects among these variables. Key findings revealed that exam performance was directly predicted by students’ early semester academic mindset entity and experiences of imposter syndrome, and indirectly affected by science resources. Science resources also directly affected their early-semester academic mindset entity, while indirectly affecting imposter feelings through academic mindset entity. These findings suggest the importance of recognizing the varied science backgrounds and experiences students bring into the classroom. Actively designing pedagogical strategies to support them may improve not only cognitive outcomes but also affective experiences such academic mindset and imposter syndrome. Supporting STEM success requires addressing not only the cognitive domain, but also the beliefs, emotions, and prior experiences students bring with them into the classroom.

Failure is recognized as valuable to learning in the classroom and research contexts. While interventions incorporating failure into learning have been explored in science education, the affective experience of failure is less understood. From an affective experience lens, failure is stigmatized and not accounted for in learning and assessment. This study explores introductory chemistry students’ affective experiences with failure through qualitative semi-structured interviews framed from an interpretivist lens. Students shared that failure is overwhelming, shapes their beliefs, is not accounted for in course design, and is defined by the learning and assessment outcomes. Asking students to fail as a part of their learning is much more nuanced than previously discussed interventions where failure is part of the design. This study explores the idea that not all failures are created equal and provides insight into laboratory activities and assessments that ask students to fail. Paying attention to students’ experiences can change your mindset as an educator and offer pathways to creating learning environments that reduce judgment, allow instructors to share their own failures, and offer feedback to help students move forward with their failures.

Empathy and its impact on students’ learning experience remains an under-researched topic in the field of affective chemistry education research. The purpose of this study was to investigate tertiary students’ understanding and perceptions of empathy with regard to their lived experience at university. This qualitative study consisted of individual semi-structured interviews with 13 undergraduate students enrolled in first-year chemistry courses at an Australian university. Abductive thematic analysis of students’ interview responses revealed that students perceived empathy predominantly as cognitive and behavioural processes. Participants perceived some university teaching roles, such as tutors and laboratory demonstrators, to be higher in empathy than others, such as lectures and course coordinators. In addition, participants did not perceive university infrastructure, either people-based (i.e. student support centre, technical support infrastructure, inclusion and disability infrastructure, etc.) or technology-based (i.e. online enrolment and timetabling platforms and learning management systems) to be empathetic. Participants described factors such as context and lived experience influencing their perception of empathy at university. Furthermore, participants made suggestions on ways to improve how empathy could be shown to students, including improving teacher communication; implementing empathetic course design in first-year chemistry courses; showing more leniency towards students; and increasing ease of use and access to infrastructure. This study aims to investigate empathy from the chemistry student perspective and help identify where teacher empathy could be best deployed within student–teacher interactions, specifically in tertiary chemistry education settings.

Laboratory teaching assistants (TAs) crucially shape undergraduates' chemistry learning experiences. However, akin to the Gordian knot metaphor (i.e., an intractable problem near impossible to solve), TA pedagogy is intricate and difficult to support by conventional means. More attention is needed to discern the complexities of enacted TA pedagogies and their alignment with equitable and effective teaching. Using Teacher Noticing, Multidimensional Noticing, and teaching for Meaningful Learning, this study involved two focal TAs, Alexandra and Bred, as a comparative case study. We used video research principles and video-stimulated recall interviews to qualitatively investigate how participants' teach acid–base titrations. Our findings indicate that TA efforts related to equitable and effective instructional moves can be both complementary and conflicting. Surprisingly, TAs may actually be the ones meaningfully learning in place of their students. Implications include suggestions for long-term training programs (video club and instructional coaching) that invite TAs to analyse students’ learning via enacted pedagogies. We offer specific, accessible, and practical suggestions to foreground particulate-level interactions, sensemaking, local agriculture, nutrition, and university life when teaching acid–base chemistry. We thus invite our community to interrogate and reimagine what we want as evidence of learning and of teaching to inform shifts in instructional laboratory culture.

When visual representations of molecules (e.g., skeletal formula) must be decoded to process a task (e.g., determine the absolute configuration of a molecule) and the corresponding schemas are not yet sufficiently automated, paper–pencil format notes may help select relevant information, organize it appropriately, and integrate knowledge without exceeding the working memory capacity (encoding and external storage). This article examines the extent to which task difficulty and invested mental effort differ for digital and paper–pencil-based tasks on the topic of chirality (RQ1) and the extent to which note-taking impacts students’ working memory load when working on paper–pencil-based chirality tasks (RQ2). The dataset is based on the responses of 80 students from Germany who completed 19 chirality task tandems (each consisting of one digital and one paper–pencil-based task) and rated their invested mental effort for each task. Item response theory analyses, group comparisons, and moderation analyses were conducted. Paper–pencil-based chirality tasks were found to be significantly easier than digital chirality tasks, and students invested significantly less mental effort in completing the paper–pencil-based chirality tasks (RQ1). Students who took notes in the paper–pencil format were found to be more capable of solving chirality tasks in both formats. Both groups invested a comparable amount of mental effort. A moderation analysis revealed that when note-taking was low, the relationship between invested mental effort and the probability of solving the task was strongest. For the note-takers, the relationship between the invested mental effort and the probability of solving the task decreased as the number of notes increased (RQ2). The results indicate that notes as external storage are relevant for processing tasks requiring handling representation. As the digital format does not offer comparable options for taking notes, notes represent a subject-specific format difference.

Peer review activities have been shown to be beneficial for chemistry students and can promote both their conceptual and science practice competencies. Previous work has focused on identifying what peer review features prompt students to revise their work, where a higher degree of revision is typically correlated with more learning benefits for the student. More recently this research has begun to identify what characteristics of the feedback recipient influence this feedback uptake. However, in order to best implement these types of activities into the classroom, we must understand how these characteristics and features influence students’ engagement with peer feedback. In this study, we utilized semi-structured interviews to simulate a peer review activity for general chemistry II students. During these interviews, we asked students to respond to a series of hypothetical peer review comments, reflect on how their confidence changed, and explain whether they would like to revise their work. Using a phenomenographic approach, we identified three distinct framings that the students adopted based on their confidence about their initial drafts. Students who experienced low confidence viewed the peer review activity as offering them a mechanism to manage their uncertainty. Meanwhile, students who felt confident about their initial draft either looked to the peer review to offer confirmation that they had gotten the correct answer, or looked for feedback on how to improve their work. These frames shaped the way the students interpreted the feedback message, which ultimately directed their revision choices. This work offers valuable insights for instructors about how to best frame peer review activities to support student learning.

Recent reforms in chemistry education aim to shift the goals of learning from knowing chemistry facts toward using chemistry understandings to make sense of natural phenomena (i.e., doing science). Doing so requires that we attend to, and work to shift, how and why students engage in class activities. To accomplish this, we must understand how the structure and enactment of chemistry courses communicate useful ways of knowing and learning – that is, how our courses convey epistemic messages. This study contributes to the larger goal of understanding epistemic messaging in science classes by investigating epistemic messages embedded in introductory organic chemistry lectures on nucleophilic substitution reactions. Specifically, our analysis describes the epistemic operations communicated (i.e., how to engage with knowledge), and the values ascribed to these operations for achieving epistemic aims (i.e., why engage with this knowledge). Analysis of seven lectures revealed that instructors communicated various epistemic operations, with notable variation in types and frequency. Most prominent were operations related to evaluating properties of chemical structures and predicting the pathway or outcome of chemical reactions. In contrast, operations associated with explaining or controlling reactions appeared less often. Some messages also conveyed the value of epistemic operations, either emphasizing their relevance for assessment or for doing science. The findings suggest that epistemic messages in lectures can frame how one should engage with knowledge in organic chemistry and why, although, in many cases, this orientation may not yet be explicit enough to be consequential to students.

Research on mechanistic reasoning in Organic Chemistry has progressed in supporting students’ mechanistic reasoning and understanding how epistemic norms influence students’ personal epistemologies and their mechanistic reasoning practice as individuals. However, not much is known about students’ collaborative knowledge-building as a discursive practice in the moment of their learning in mechanistic reasoning classrooms. Thus, our study focuses on how different problem designs impact students’ knowledge-building in whole class discussions. We use design research comparing the impact of different problem designs, i.e., single-case vs. case-comparison complex mechanisms tasks, in two semesters of a “Mechanistic Reasoning in Organic Chemistry” class for graduate and upper-level undergraduate students. To gain a deeper understanding of how students’ knowledge-building happens in their interactions with the instructor, we draw on sociocultural theory and make use of two specific constructs: (1) “epistemic agency” as power to shape knowledge-building and (2) “coherence” referring to the logical and consistent connection of ideas. Our findings show how transforming complex mechanism tasks from single-case to case-comparison problems provide students with different opportunities to enact epistemic agency and engage in coherent reasoning during discourse. Our findings have implications for developing instructional practices and resources to encourage meaningful, collaborative knowledge-building in mechanistic reasoning classrooms.

In school settings, language plays a crucial role in the transmission of knowledge. This case study describes and compares the Pedagogical Scientific Language Knowledge (PSLK) of a novice and an experienced junior high school chemistry teacher. Data were collected from 40 classroom observations, as well as semi-structured and post-class interviews. Using the PSLK framework, we evaluated the teachers’ performances across PSLK elements. Results revealed distinct PSLK characteristics and teaching differences between the two educators. The experienced teacher demonstrated effective integration and adaptive optimization of scientific language strategies, including multimodal scaffolding, conceptual-language synergy, and contextualization in real-life situations. In contrast, the novice teacher adopted fragmented and formulaic approaches, characterized by inconsistent terminology use, superficial connections between concepts and language, and limited adaptability in teaching strategies. These findings underscore the need for teacher education programs to explicitly foster the systematic integration and adaptive use of PSLK to support the professional growth of novice teachers.

Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) is a widely adopted active-learning strategy in undergraduate STEM education with known benefits for student achievement. While much of the existing literature focuses on academic outcomes of this pedagogy, the intent of this article is to highlight the underlying mechanisms that contribute to its impact (Chan J. Y. and Bauer C. F., (2015), J. Res. Sci. Teach., 52(3), 319–346). Through semi-structured interviews with ten students from a general chemistry course, this qualitative study addresses that gap by investigating how PLTL supports both cognitive and affective dimensions of learning, particularly in relation to sense of belonging and self-efficacy. Through detailed analysis of student reflections, our findings reveal that key mechanisms such as peer explanation, collaborative learning, and the development of a sense of belonging work together to create a supportive and interactive learning environment. By highlighting the how and why of PLTL's impact, the study offers valuable insights for educators seeking to design peer-led instructional models as a site for epistemological and identity development in STEM.