Specific to the topic of oxidation-reduction (redox), teachers are obligated by the discipline to prioritise symbolic traditions such as writing equations, documenting oxidation states, and describing changes (e.g., what undergoes oxidation/reduction). Although the chemistry education research community endorses connecting the vertices of…

Despite years of research and practice inspired by chemistry education research, a recent report shows that US secondary instruction is not aligned with current national reform-based efforts. One means to mitigate this discrepancy is focusing on pedagogical conceptual change, its precursors (higher selfefficacy and pedagogical discontentment), and…

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…

Even when chemistry teachers' beliefs about assessment design align with literature-cited best practices, barriers can prevent teachers from enacting those beliefs when developing day-to-day assessments. In this paper, the relationship between high school chemistry teachers' self-generated "best practices" for developing formative…

For six semesters, activities have been incorporated into first year general chemistry courses in an effort to build student conceptual chemistry knowledge. The activities follow a learning cycle pedagogy (similar to Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning or POGIL activities) and consist of guiding questions involving animations, models,…

Designing high school chemistry assessments is a complex and difficult task. Although prior studies about assessment have offered teachers guidelines and standards as support to generate quality assessment items, little is known about how teachers engage these supports or enact their own beliefs into practice while developing assessments.…

Implementation of the flipped classroom approach into STEM courses has been popularized in the last decade and has generally been reported to improve student performance outcomes. In a flipped classroom setting, students typically first encounter course content in the online format and subsequently engage in some form of active learning during the…

High school chemistry teachers struggle to use assessment results to inform instruction. In the absence of expert assistance, teachers often look to their peers for guidance and support; however, little is known about the assessment beliefs and practices of high school chemistry teachers or the discourse mechanisms used as teachers support one…

Conducting qualitative research in any discipline warrants two actions: accessing participants and eliciting their ideas. In chemistry education research (CER), survey techniques have been used to increase access to participants and diversify samples. Interview tasks (such as card sorting, using demonstrations, and using simulations) have been…

Academic tracking, placing students in different classes based on past performance, is a common feature of the American secondary school system. A longitudinal study of secondary students' chemistry self-concept scores was conducted, and one feature of the study was the presence of academic tracking. Though academic tracking is one way to group…

Although observational protocols have been developed that assess different aspects of science teaching, none of the protocols existing in the literature address the principles of effective chemistry instruction guided by Johnstone's triangle of macroscopic, symbolic, and particulate representations of matter (Johnstone, 1991). We developed our own…

Teachers tend to instruct topically, which requires the student to use multiple and interconnected concepts to succeed in each instructional unit. Therefore, it is beneficial to combine research on related concepts to form topic driven instruments to better assist teachers in assessing and instructing students. Chemical and physical change as a…

Inquiry-based instruction requires a deep, conceptual understanding of the process of science combined with a sophisticated knowledge of teaching and learning. This study examines the changes in classroom instructional practices and corresponding changes to knowledge and beliefs about inquiry instruction for eight high school chemistry teachers.…

High school chemistry teachers' experiences learning science through lectures and verification labs make it difficult for them to transition to inquiry-based approaches called for in the U.S. National Science Education Standards. Unfortunately, widely implemented approaches to teacher professional development (PD) aimed at reform, such as…