The level of students' engagement during active learning activities conducted in small groups is important to understanding the effectiveness of these activities. The Interactive-Constructive-Active-Passive (ICAP) framework is a way to determine the cognitive engagement of these groups by analyzing the conversations that occur while student groups…

Chemistry education research has increasingly considered the role of affect when investigating chemistry learning environments over the past decade. Despite its popularity in educational spheres, mindset has been understudied from a chemistry-specific perspective. Mindset encompasses one's beliefs about the ability to change intelligence with…

Students' beliefs about their ability to improve their intelligence (known as mindset) likely have more impact on their academic outcomes when engaging in challenging learning environments, such as introductory undergraduate chemistry courses. To date, little research has been conducted on the chemistry-specific aspects of intelligence which…

Identity has been proposed as a mechanism to increase persistence within Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education programs. To assess the impact of identity on STEM persistence, measures that produce valid and reliable data within a given STEM discipline need to be employed. Therefore, this study developed and evaluated…

The Science Motivation Questionnaire II (SMQ II) was developed to measure aspects of student motivation in college-level science courses. Items on the SMQ II are structured such that the word 'science' can be replaced with any discipline title (e.g., chemistry) to produce a discipline-specific measure of student motivation. Since its original…

As the field of chemistry education moves toward greater inclusion and increased participation by underrepresented minorities, standards for investigating the differential impacts and outcomes of learning environments have to be considered. While quantitative methods may not be capable of generating the in-depth nuances of qualitative methods,…

Identity has been theorized to aid in student persistence within STEM disciplines. In this study, science and chemistry identity were defined as being recognized as a science or chemistry person within the classroom. To generalize the effects that identity has on student persistence, a measurable construct must be defined, operationalized, and…

Increased understanding of the importance of the affective domain in chemistry education research has led to the development and adaptation of instruments to measure chemistry-specific affective traits, including motivation. Many of these instruments are adapted from other fields by using the word "chemistry" in place of other…

Fundamentally concerned with motivation, self-determination theory (SDT) represents a framework of several mini-theories to explore how social context interacts with people's motivational types categorized by degree of regulation internalization. This paper aims to modify an existing theory-based instrument (Academic Motivation Scale, or AMS) and…

Student success in chemistry is inherently tied to motivational and other affective processes. We investigated three distinct constructs tied to motivation: self-efficacy, interest, and effort beliefs. These variables were measured twice over the course of a semester in three sections of a first-semester general chemistry course (n = 170). We…

Research in academic motivation has highlighted a number of salient constructs that are predictive of positive learning strategies and academic success. Most of this research has centered on college-level social sciences or secondary school student populations. The main purpose of this study was to adapt existing measures of personal interest and…

Assessing conceptual understanding of foundational topics before instruction on higher-order concepts can provide chemical educators with information to aid instructional design. This study provides an instrument that can be used to identify students' alternative conceptions regarding thermochemistry concepts. The Thermochemistry Concept Inventory…