Supporting the Growth and Impact of the Chemistry-Education

Commentary Cite This: J. Chem. Educ. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX

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Supporting the Growth and Impact of the Chemistry-EducationResearch Community Deborah G. Herrington,*,† Ryan D. Sweeder,‡ Patrick L. Daubenmire,§ Christopher F. Bauer,∥ Stacey Lowery Bretz,⊥ Diane M. Bunce,¶ Justin H. Carmel,□ Reneé Cole,■ Brittland K. DeKorver,† Resa M. Kelly,○ Scott E. Lewis,● Maria Oliver-Hoyo,△ Stephanie A. C. Ryan,▲ Marilyne Stains,▽ Marcy H. Towns,▼ and Ellen J. Yezierski⊥ †

Chemistry Department, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Michigan 49401, United States Lyman Briggs College, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48825, United States § Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60660, United States ∥ Department of Chemistry, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire 03824, United States ⊥ Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio 45056, United States ¶ Department of Chemistry, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC 20064, United States □ Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Florida International University, Miami, Florida 33199, United States ■ Department of Chemistry, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242, United States ○ Department of Chemistry, San José State University, San José, California 95192, United States ● Department of Chemistry, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida 33620, United States △ Department of Chemistry, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27695, United States ▲ Ryan Education Consulting LLC, Carmel, Indiana 46032, United States ▽ Department of Chemistry, University of NebraskaLincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska 68588, United States ▼ Department of Chemistry, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47906, United States

J. Chem. Educ. Downloaded from pubs.acs.org by 31.40.210.131 on 02/11/19. For personal use only.

‡

S Supporting Information *

ABSTRACT: Chemistry-education research (CER) has progressed considerably in the United States since emerging as a discipline in the 1970s. Although CER graduate programs have become well established at a few universities, their success and growth may not be assured. Even with an increasing number of chemistry departments across the United States employing one or more CER faculty, CER can still be a novel entity to many traditional chemists. CER faculty continue to face the challenge of educating colleagues and students about CER scholarship. To start conversations about how we as a community can begin to address some of these challenges, a group of CER faculty representing a variety of backgrounds and experiences were brought together for a symposium at the 2018 Biennial Conference on Chemical Education. Most talks at the symposium were given by copresenters who had not previously worked together but had experience within the given topic. This commentary is an extension of that symposium in which the presenters use their combined experiences in considering how undergraduate research, postdoctoral positions, mentoring, collaboration, and networking can enhance the growth and recognition of CER. In framing this commentary, we pose two questions to the CER community: (1) How do we strategically grow the CER community, considering the multiple pathways by which people enter CER? (2) What can be done to make CER a more widely accepted and recognizable discipline? KEYWORDS: Graduate Education/Research, Chemical Education Research, Administrative Issues, Professional Development he chemistry-education-research (CER) field began with faculty, primarily trained in the research methods of traditional chemistry subdisciplines, who wished to apply evidence-based approaches to improving the teaching and learning of chemistry. Drawing upon the theories and methods of disciplines such as education, cognitive science, social psychology, and other related fields, CER has grown to become a subdiscipline of chemistry with dedicated conferences and peer-reviewed journals. CER symposia are regularly scheduled at national American Chemical Society meetings, and CER faculty are employed in chemistry departments

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© XXXX American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.

across the United States. Despite the substantial growth in knowledge about the teaching and learning of chemistry over the past four decades, there is still much to be done to establish CER as a more widely recognized subdiscipline of chemistry and further its impact to more broadly improve the teaching and learning of chemistry.1 The ideas shared here come from a variety of CER scholars and are intended to frame an ongoing Received: October 8, 2018 Revised: January 24, 2019

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DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.8b00823 J. Chem. Educ. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX

Journal of Chemical Education

Commentary

Figure 1. (A) Locations of chemistry departments in the continental United States where students can earn a Ph.D. (blue pins) or an M.A. or M.S. (green pins) in chemistry for research on the teaching and learning of chemistry. (B) Locations of chemistry departments in the continental United States with defunct Ph.D. pathways (red pins) or M.A. or M.S. pathways (purple pins) in chemistry for research on the teaching and learning of chemistry.

Table 1. List of Goal Statements on the Survey for Research Mentors of Undergraduate Students in Order of Importance (Most to Least Important) Based on Respondents’ Rankings Goal Category A B C D E F G H I

Survey Items

Development of Current Undergrads

To offer students research skills and the other benefits of high-impact practices (e.g., increase retention and engagement) Development of Current Undergrads To improve student learning and metacognition by offering undergraduates opportunities to reflect on students’ learning difficulties, curriculum design, and assessments Development of Future Grad Students To provide students with foundational skills and background to help them succeed in graduate programs Expectations of the Field To give future teachers and professors the tools to use evidence-based practices and engage in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) Expectations of the Field To normalize the presence of CER in chemistry departments, so that undergraduates who go into other chemistry fields create a cultural shift as they populate other institutions Development of Current Undergrads and Helping students to find out if CER graduate programs align with their career goals Future Grad Students Expectations of the Field To allow faculty at primarily undergraduate institutions to meet their departments’ expectations of scholarship (e.g., advancing research in their field, publications, etc.) Development of Future Grad Students To produce more well-rounded researchers by giving students another set of CER experiences in addition to their Ph.D. work Development of Future Grad Students Recruiting candidates for chemistry-education Ph.D. programs

chemistry departments (with 46 tenured and tenure-track CER faculty) provided an opportunity for pathway 2 in the United States (Figure 1A).3 However, unlike more traditional subdisciplines of chemistry, the number and locations of CER doctoral programs continue to fluctuate. Across the last two decades, at least 17 departments of chemistry in the United States that previously employed tenured or tenure-track CER faculty no longer actively offer a Ph.D. or M.S. degree in CER (Figure 1B). This suggests that CER is not yet uniformly viewed by institutions as essential to the discipline of chemistry. Recent National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded efforts to collect data regarding doctoral degrees in CER (pathway 2) indicate that the majority of CER doctoral degrees come from a small number of institutions. 4 Furthermore, in contrast with traditional chemistry dissertations, some CER dissertations have been supervised by faculty without any formal training in CER. Border-crossers (people who wish to practice CER but have no formal training in the field) have made critical contributions to the field, but as CER has grown and developed rigorous methodologies,1 the threshold for entry has become higher, necessitating a greater capacity for formal CER training.

discussion about how to help CER thrive so that it can achieve this goal. We begin by describing the current state of CER graduate education and the ways people enter the CER field. This provides the basis for discussions of various mechanisms for supporting and growing the CER community as well as strategies for increasing the impact of CER.

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CURRENT STATE OF CER PROGRAMS IN THE UNITED STATES In its 2012 report, the National Research Council Committee on the Status, Contributions, and Future Directions of Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER) identified five pathways by which scholars engage in research about the teaching and learning of science.2 (1) Conducting undergraduate research (2) Earning a Ph.D. in chemistry with dissertation research in CER (3) Earning a Ph.D. in bench chemistry with a subsequent postdoctoral appointment in CER (4) Earning a Ph.D. in science education (5) Earning tenure as a bench chemist and then “border crossing” to specialize in CER Data regarding the number of people who have traversed each of these pathways into careers in CER is difficult to estimate. At the start of the 2018−2019 academic year, 28 B



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Commentary

UNDERGRADUATE CHEMISTRY-EDUCATION RESEARCH Sustaining and growing the number of recognized CER programs across the United States also requires nurturing CER in undergraduate chemistry education. Undergraduate (UG) students are normally introduced to chemistry subdisciplines (e.g., analytical chemistry, biochemistry, and organic chemistry) through their coursework. Courses in chemistry education are rarely part of UG programs, and so for UG students, CER is often first encountered via UG research opportunities (pathway 1). Currently, little is known about the impact of these experiences on students’ decisions to pursue CER; however, it seems reasonable that students introduced to it as an undergraduate are more likely to be aware that it can be pursued as an area for graduate work. To understand faculty goals for engaging students in UG CER, we surveyed CER faculty research mentors (N = 56, see the Supporting Information for the full survey), asking them to rank goals in terms of importance and then with respect to realization. Not surprisingly, faculty focused on the importance of nurturing the development of undergraduate students’ skills and career potential, prioritizing goals A−C (Table 1) over other goal categories, including promoting graduate research in CER (goal I). This suggests that faculty are trying to support their students but are not actively using UG CER to recruit into the field. Also notable was that 49 out of the 56 respondents said they carry out UG CER in order to normalize the presence of CER in chemistry departments, but only 8 respondents indicated that this goal was realized. This suggests that mentors recognize that CER is not yet a common subdiscipline within many chemistry departments, although they engage in CER mentoring. To broaden the impact of the field, our community could better capitalize on UG CER opportunities as a means for introducing students and colleagues to data- and theory-driven instructional-decisionmaking in chemistry. One mechanism for introducing undergraduates to further opportunities in CER is to encourage faculty mentors of UG CER to have students present their research at conferences that include CER symposia.

will play a critical role in both growing the CER community and establishing it as a sustainable chemistry subdiscipline.

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GROWING THE IMPACT OF CER The growth and sustainability of CER necessitates quality research that yields widely disseminated and adopted findings. It is crucial that this work considers multiple settings (high school, college, and informal education) and varied populations to ensure that both the research questions asked and the results generated are of interest and applicable to the larger chemistry-education community. Another challenge is the perceived or realized isolation of CER faculty (and their students), with many institutions having only one CER faculty member. The inclusion of CER scholars at institutions with fewer resources also means that the CER community must find ways to offer professional development opportunities that do not require extensive resources in terms of time and travel money. Multi-institution collaborations have the ability to help address these issues. Such collaborations can provide workarounds to some constraints of solo research endeavors, such as time, money, and access to different student populations. Faculty and students who engage in CER across institution types or settings also serve to model the discipline and its impact to the next generation of students, thereby increasing the visibility of CER to students and potential border-crossers as well as future teachers, faculty, informal educators, and chemical professionals. Moving forward, the CER community should develop a culture that encourages collaboration through efforts such as web-conferences, such as those hosted by the RSC Chemical Education Research Group,5 or the inclusion of virtual presenters at group meetings to facilitate the dissemination and spread of CER methods and findings. It can also capitalize on resources such as ACS’s Society Committee on Education (SOCED) or ChemEd Xchange to facilitate connections across the CER community.

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MENTORING AND COLLABORATION IN DEVELOPING CHEMISTRY-EDUCATION RESEARCHERS The professional guidance provided by the founders of the field to those just starting out shaped the trajectory of CER. Having someone accomplished in the field take the time to learn about emerging researchers, offer advice, and even collaborate on projects often provided the catalyst needed for success. Healthy mentorships helped launch the field and continue to help the field grow. This is exemplified in the success of several recent NSF-funded conferences that brought together experienced CER scholars to mentor CER graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in numerous areas, including grant writing, study design, and CV development.6 With an increase in the number of CER graduate programs and postdoctoral positions, some of the mentoring in CER has become more formalized. Resources such as the ACS ChemIDP7 can be used to support these formalized mentoring relationships. Here, we focus primarily on the often daunting development of more informal mentoring relationships for new faculty in CER positions or potential border-crossers. Developing expertise to conduct meaningful, rigorous, and well-designed CER studies requires adequate time and mentoring. CER graduate students and postdocs make great gains during their formal training but still benefit from interacting and collaborating with others who are more

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POSTGRADUATE EXPERIENCES For those with a CER Ph.D. (pathway 2), a postdoc provides opportunities to expand one’s network and expertise as well as engage in experiences such as directing research projects, mentoring graduate students, and writing grant proposals. In other chemistry subdisciplines, a faculty position often requires a postdoctoral experience, yet it is only within the past decade that postdoctoral positions in CER have become more common. Twenty postdoctoral positions were advertised on the CER listserv in 2018. For someone coming from a traditional bench Ph.D. program, a CER postdoc or sabbatical experience can be an entry point into the field and community (pathways 3 and 5). They provide opportunities to gain depth of knowledge and experience with the research methods in the discipline. To support border-crossers (pathway 5), we may wish to find ways to formalize these types of sabbatical experiences, such as by requesting funding for supporting faculty on sabbatical in grant requests. This would help ensure that these individuals are able to contribute high-quality work to the field. Thus, it is reasonable to hypothesize that CER postgraduate experiences C



Commentary

people enter CER? (2) What can be done to make CER a more widely accepted and recognizable discipline? Growing the community will require fostering the pathways for entry into CER and supporting the individuals who seek to engage in CER. However, increasing the acceptance and impact of CER requires that the CER community supports conclusions based on data from well-designed studies1 and extends its networks beyond the chemistry-education community.

experienced in CER. For border-crossers, mentoring and collaboration is often critical to help train them in the rising standards of the discipline. Further, even those highly experienced in CER can learn new skills and gain new insights when they engage in meaningful mentoring relationships or collaborations with researchers with complementing strengths. The process of identifying potential mentors (or mentees) and collaborators may be intimidating but remains crucial for ongoing professional development and requires engagement in the CER community from members at all stages. Newer members of the community are encouraged to reach out to more established members: ask them to have coffee to discuss their work, invite them to give a seminar at your institution, or ask if they would be willing to come see your poster and discuss your project. More experienced members can freely share their knowledge to help strengthen the quality of the research by providing suggestions for future studies, alternative analysis methods, or even potential collaborations. Although virtual communications have made it possible to engage, collaborate, and maintain relationships across large distances, face-to-face meetings and interactions are still a critical venue for developing relationships.8 This emphasizes the importance of attending and actively participating in events such as national meetings to support the development of these important relationships.

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ASSOCIATED CONTENT

S Supporting Information *

The Supporting Information is available on the ACS Publications website at DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.8b00823. Full survey of CER faculty (PDF, DOCX)

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AUTHOR INFORMATION

Corresponding Author

*E-mail: [email protected]. ORCID

Deborah G. Herrington: 0000-0001-6682-8466 Ryan D. Sweeder: 0000-0002-5488-4927 Stacey Lowery Bretz: 0000-0001-5503-8987 Diane M. Bunce: 0000-0001-9069-3573 Justin H. Carmel: 0000-0001-9281-3751 Renée Cole: 0000-0002-2807-1500 Scott E. Lewis: 0000-0002-6899-9450 Maria Oliver-Hoyo: 0000-0003-3542-4930 Stephanie A. C. Ryan: 0000-0002-7404-9726 Marcy H. Towns: 0000-0002-8422-4874 Ellen J. Yezierski: 0000-0002-7067-7944

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NETWORKING AND OUTREACH The CER community has grown as an intellectual network of ideas, practices, and people over the past 40 years, spawned dozens of new CER Ph.D. programs, and developed connections with other DBER communities. Such confluence has led to higher-quality publications as well as increases in the number of citations and impact factors.9−12 However, the primary goal of improving the teaching and learning of chemistry requires having an impact beyond the CER community. To accomplish this, attention must also be focused outward to the rest of the chemistry instructional and professional community. Educating colleagues about the rigor expected in the theories and methods of CER remains paramount. This can be done when CER scholars give invited research seminars by making a point to meet with other faculty outside of their immediate interests to showcase the nature of this work. Seeking to publish in more traditional chemistry or science journals and giving talks at national meetings and symposia outside of CER can garner awareness and begin to forge collaborations between CER and industry, which are found in the more traditional chemistry subdisciplines. Such outreach has the ability to share how CER can directly influence and improve chemistry education across all instructional environments. Our community has great potential, but its growth will depend on not only developing and supporting the members of the CER community but also building networks with the broader community of chemists. Some ideas for promoting these connections include attending new conferences with topics beyond one’s expertise, collaborating on research projects that cross content areas, and hosting CER symposia in local areas or at home institutions.

Notes

The authors declare no competing financial interest.

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REFERENCES

(1) Cooper, M. M.; Stowe, R. L. Chemistry Education Research From Personal Empiricism to Evidence, Theory, and Informed Practice. Chem. Rev. 2018, 118 (12), 6053−6087. (2) Singer, S. R., Nielsen, N. R., Schweingruber, H. A., Eds.; Discipline-Based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering; National Academies Press: Washington, DC, 2012. (3) Bretz, S. L. CER Graduate Programs. Bretz Research Group website. http://chemistry.miamioh.edu/bretzsl/cer/gradprograms (accessed Sept 26, 2018). (4) Bodner, G. M. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. Personal communication, 2018. (5) Seery, M. Author Archives: Michael Seery. RSC Chemical Education Research Group blog. https://rsccerg.wordpress.com/ author/michaeldit/ (accessed Jan 21, 2019). (6) Bretz, S. L. Chemistry Education Research Graduate Student and Post-Docs Professional Development Conferences. Bretz Research Group website. http://chemistry.miamioh.edu/bretzsl/cergsc/ (accessed Oct 2, 2018). (7) ChemIDP. American Chemical Society. https://chemidp.acs.org/ node/532. (8) McConnell, T. J.; Parker, J. M.; Eberhardt, J.; Koehler, M. J.; Lundeberg, M. A. Virtual Professional Learning Communities: Teachers’ Perceptions of Virtual Versus Face-to-Face Professional Development. J. Sci. Educ. Technol. 2013, 22 (3), 267−277. (9) Rodriguez, J-M. G.; Bain, K.; Moon, A.; Mack, M. R.; DeKorver, B. K.; Towns, M. H. The Citation Index of Chemistry Education Research in the Journal of Chemical Education from 2008−2016: A

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CONCLUSION We began this commentary with two questions for the community: (1) How do we strategically grow the CER community, considering the multiple pathways by which D



Commentary

Closer Look at the Impact Factor. J. Chem. Educ. 2017, 94 (5), 558− 562. (10) Teo, T. W.; Goh, M. T.; Yeo, L. W. Chemistry education research trends: 2004−2013. Chem. Educ. Res. Pract. 2014, 15, 470− 487. (11) Ye, L.; Lewis, S. E.; Raker, J. R.; Oueini, R. Examining the Impact of Chemistry Education Research Articles from 2007 through 2013 by Citation Counts. J. Chem. Educ. 2015, 92 (8), 1299−1305. (12) Craig, A. F.; Koch, D. L.; Buffington, A.; Grove, N. Narrowing the Gap? Revisiting Publication Rates in Chemistry Education. J. Chem. Educ. 2012, 89 (12), 1606−1608.

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Supporting the Growth and Impact of the Chemistry-Education

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