Leveling the Field: Flipped Instruction as a Tool for Promoting Equity in General Chemistry (original) (raw)
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Student Experiences and Motivations in a Flipped General Chemistry II Course
2020
Student-centered pedagogies have become increasingly popular in higher education. Research on flipped learning, in particular, has shown that collaborative problem-solving environments are able to better support effective learning than lecture alone. However, the effects of this format on students' interests and motivations in chemistry remain unknown. For this study, students and graduate teaching assistants who participated in a flipped learning, second-semester general chemistry course were selected to participate in a focus group discussion and individual interviews that explored their experiences and perceptions of the features of the course (affordances) that supported and thwarted their sense of motivation.This phenomenographic study mapped eight students' experiences of the course and used qualitative data from interviews with the graduate teaching assistants (TAs) to compare and contrast with students' claims. Self-determination theory was used to frame these ex...
Community College Chemistry Coursetaking and STEM Academic Persistence
Journal of Chemical Education, 2018
Community colleges educate nearly half of all students who complete postsecondary degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. For many matriculated students, chemistry is a required gatekeeping course for postsecondary retention and advancement in STEM majors. This research explored community college student enrollment and performance in introductory chemistry courses for STEM majors, and how chemistry achievement related to student background characteristics and degree persistence. Data included grades, demographics, enrollment patterns, and degree status for 1,690 chemistry students who matriculated at a diverse, suburban community college from 2011 to 2014. Descriptive statistics indicated 32% of students received grades of D, F, or W in introductory chemistry; 49% of these students changed their majors after taking the course, with fourfifths of those degree changers switching to non-STEM fields. Binary logistic regression models revealed that chemistry enrollment was a significant predictor of degree change to non-STEM disciplines, with biology and anatomy/physiology coursetaking predicting STEM persistence. Degree change to non-STEM was predicted by chemistry performance but not by student characteristics including gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. The results indicate that chemistry coursetaking and performance are notable factors affecting student persistence in STEM disciplines, and achievement is largely independent of student background variables. Implications for community college chemistry teaching and STEM academic advisement are discussed.
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To compensate for the fast-paced, content-driven nature of the Foundation Chemistry module, which is coupled with wide-ranging learner knowledge and backgrounds, a fully flipped approach was introduced for the topics of qualitative equilibria and quantitative kinetics to assess whether this could improve learners’ understanding and attainment. Statistical analysis of module and exam marks provides some evidence that the fully flipped approach had a positive impact on attainment for the topic of quantitative equilibria, and the learners’ perceptions, as measured through a survey, for this topic confirmed that the flipped model had indeed improved their understanding. However, there is no evidence to suggest any improvement in learner understanding in the more complex topic of quantitative kinetics. After considering both the analysis outcomes and the learner responses to the survey, it is suggested that the flipped methodology be used as part of a mixed methods approach to teaching.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021
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Journal of Chemical Education, 2011
This paper examines the impact of supplemental instruction (SI)nonremedial workshops that support regularly scheduled courseson four different chemistry courses: General Chemistry I and II, and Organic Chemistry I and II. Differences in how SI impacts student performance in these courses are discussed, particularly in terms of whether students from underrepresented minority groups are affected differently from their peers. We found that SI appears to be most effective in courses at the beginning of the chemistry sequence and least effective in those in which students have already had to demonstrate effectiveness with the material in order to succeed in the course; its impact on performance in General Chemistry I appears to be quite high compared to a negligible impact in Organic Chemistry II. Impacts appear to be due to SI itself rather than the academic fitness of the students who opt to enroll in it. In the four courses examined, SI did not appear to have a different impact on students from underrepresented minority groups than it did on their peers.
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Chemistry Education Research and Practice, 2016
The flipped classroom continues to attract significant attention in higher education. Building upon our recent parallel controlled study of the flipped classroom in a second-term general chemistry course (J. Chem. Educ., 2016, 93, 13–23), here we report on a redesign of the flipped course aimed at scaling up total enrollment while keeping discussion sizes small (i.e., <30 students), and maintaining equivalent contact hour load for faculty and workload for students. To that end, the course format featured lecture contact pushed outside of the classroom in the form of video lectures (mean duration 13 minutes) paired with online homework sets, and three parallel weekly one-hour discussion sections were held in adjoining lab rooms immediately prior to the three-hour laboratory session. As in our previous design, the discussion sections were led by teaching assistants; however, the weekly discussion meeting was shortened from 75 minutes to 50 minutes, and the primary instructor “float...