Chemistry

Teaching chemistry as a practice rather than as a mere collection of facts demands that teachers modify their practices, particularly their approach to formative assessment (FA). In this study, we investigated how teachers’ FA practices changed as a result of their participation in a professional development program designed with a Chemical Thinking perspective.

The effective use of formative assessment (FA) has been demonstrated to confer positive impacts on student learning. To understand why and how FA works, it is necessary to characterize teachers’ FA practices, but because both teaching practice and learning depend on the nature of the discipline, there are disciplinary aspects to examining this. This study aimed to develop an analysis of chemistry teachers’ FA practices through the lens of the chemical thinking framework.

Formative assessment is an important component of teaching as it enables teachers to foster student learning by uncovering, interpreting, and advancing student thinking. In this work, we sought to characterize how experienced chemistry teachers notice and interpret student thinking shown in written work, and how they respond to what they learn about it.

COVID-19 has thrust educators into a period of uncertainty, complicating conventional ways of teaching and learning. We suspect that the pandemic has magnified the challenges that some high school teachers already experience, particularly when they are the sole chemistry teacher at their school. The pandemic has likely inhibited collegial interactions and access to professional development (PD). Our reflections from redesigning a face-to-face PD program to one that is remotely delivered provide recommendations that advance PD accessibility and interactivity to mitigate isolation and other longstanding challenges teachers may face. In this article, we discuss how the cognitive learning model informed emergent teaching practices that guided the transformation of the PD’s implementation for 20 high school chemistry teachers.

Researchers have typically identified and characterized teachers’ knowledge bases (e.g., pedagogical content knowledge and subject matter knowledge) in an effort to improve enacted instructional strategies. As shown by the Refined Consensus Model (RCM), understanding teacher learning, beliefs, and practices is predicated on the interconnections of such knowledge bases. However, lesson planning (defined as the transformation of subject matter knowledge to enacted pedagogical content knowledge) remains underexplored despite its central position in the RCM. We aim to address this gap by developing a conceptual framework known as Pedagogical Chemistry Sensemaking (PedChemSense).

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) have been imperative for informing many facets of the chemistry education research field, one of which includes the professional development (PD) of high school teachers. While many researchers and practitioners have responded to the NGSS’ calls for reform by attending to internal factors that influence the PD’s design, resources, and facilitation, there is less attention on extant factors that may negatively affect PD uptake and fidelity. Such factors encompass traditions of teaching chemistry or chemistry-related imprecisions within the NGSS themselves. If left unaddressed, these factors can act as anchors preventing advancements toward students’ particle-level explanations and their chemistry conceptual understanding. In this article, we investigate the uptake and fidelity of our own PD program known as the VisChem Institute.

Interview with Steve Roderick about helping teachers on the InquirySpace project bring more authentic science experiences to their classes.