Recent studies have demonstrated a clear gap between the skills that high school graduates obtain by the completion of high school and those that are necessary for success in college as well as the workforce. Demands for more rigorous preparation at the high school level have prompted some states to make changes to state standards and high school…

General chemistry is a foundational course that most STEM students are required to take at some point in their academic careers, as such, thousands of students find themselves in a chemistry classroom every year. Students come into the classroom not only from different academic backgrounds but also from a variety of social and emotional…

Science education at the postsecondary level is essential to building a foundation for increasing support, participation, and interest in STEM occupations and careers. This current study uses a phenomenological approach to explore the lived experiences and perspectives of eight post-secondary science majors while enrolled in a university 200-level…

The American school system is funded, operated, and evaluated based on student academic achievement data that is generated by various assessment tools and grading practices. The most traditional grading practice, norm-referenced grading, assesses student academic achievement on a 100-point scale that is further broken into categorical levels (A-F)…

Over the years it has become more common for practitioners to use the NGSS scientific practices to inform curricula at the undergraduate level. One of these practices is argumentation, the process of engaging in argument from evidence. Argumentation is an important part of the scientific process because scientists must make claims about their…

Chemistry is considered a difficult subject by most students. Its difficulty lies in Chemistry's complex and abstract nature. This highly abstract nature requires constant interplay and coordination between the macroscopic, particulate, and symbolic representations. Experts can successfully navigate the various representations without overloading…

The main topics of this dissertation are: 1) the development and discussion of a new molecular balance for measuring alkyl-alkyl interactions in a wide array of organic solvents, 2) the development of linear solvation energy relationships between solvent interaction parameters and solvent accessible surface area (SASA) in CH-arene interactions,…

Chemistry students often struggle in organic chemistry courses. In fact, these courses are viewed by some as "weed-out" classes. There are many fundamental concepts covered in general chemistry that contribute to students' ability to succeed in organic chemistry. One of those fundamental topics, and the focus of this study, is the topic…

Many science teachers leave the teaching profession during the first five years of practice resulting in a "greening" of the population. This phenomenon produces a high concentration of early-career teachers with low levels of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). PCK is the ultimate measure for knowing the content one teaches and the…

The purpose of this collective case study was to describe the student-autonomous learning experiences of secondary chemistry students actively engaged in classrooms utilizing a flipped classroom approach (FCA). The FCA is a pedagogical framework that includes asynchronous, student-paced experiences outside the classroom and face-to-face active…

Over the past two decades, chemistry education researchers shifted their focus toward what skills might be required in the twenty-first century chemical industry and to question whether the learning that occurs in traditional undergraduate teaching labs is sufficient for preparing the future workforce. For example, learning from failure and…

In response to both nationwide calls for reform and a perception that the existing chemistry curriculum was not meeting the needs of life science students, faculty in the department of chemistry at Purdue created a redesigned chemistry course sequence specifically aimed at preparing biology majors. The new sequence, called the 1-2-1 curriculum,…

There is a gap in the literature regarding the association between critical thinking (CT) skills and student success in chemistry. This study sought to fill this gap by evaluating the association between CT skills and student success in chemistry. The purpose of this study was (a) to determine whether there is a positive correlation between CT…

Understanding how student characteristics affect learning in chemistry can influence the pedagogical strategies employed by chemistry instructors. Previous studies have investigated the effects of characteristics including prior knowledge, math ability, and motivations on course performance. Student characteristics can also influence study…

At the molecular level, chemical processes involve the rearrangement of atoms in space and time. Students often struggle with visualizing the 3D spatial characteristics of molecules and transition states, as well as recognizing the dynamic nature of chemistry. Both visual spatial skills and representational competence should be explicitly trained…