CHEM 641 - Chemistry and Biochemistry Education Research on Learning, Learning Environments, and Teaching

4 Credit(s) | |
Description:
This course is a survey of research in chemistry and biochemistry education on learning, learning environments, and instructional approaches. Students will learn from major research studies in each of the three areas, and will focus on implications for the practice of teaching chemistry and biochemistry in undergraduate courses, and also high school courses where appropriate. Topics on learning include cognitive models of reasoning in problem solving, visuo-spatial abilities and visualization in chemistry and biochemistry, conceptual change theories underlying learning progressions, and metacognition. Topics on learning environments include social discourse models applied to laboratory learning environments and online course/web-based environments. Topics on instructional approaches include studies on student impacts of popular and widespread pedagogical approaches, such as clickers, peer-tutoring, problem-based learning, and Process-Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL). The overarching theoretical paradigm on learning, learning environments, and teaching that will be analyzed critically through all topics studied is constructivism. The course provides a basic introduction to qualitative and quantitative methods as used in papers that are studied for each topic. Each student will conduct a mini-experiment, and will collect and analyze pilot data either in an undergraduate or high school chemistry or biology class, and then compare to the results or implications of one of the research papers studied in the course.

038640:1