Abstract: “Everyday chemistry educators use resources relating to their curriculum to help advance student learning in the classroom. These materials can be anything from online sources, videos, or even lab experiments. Further, teachers are always looking for resources to help improve their own teaching ability and student understanding; applying different materials can be beneficial for students and the facilitator. This study looked at shared resources from practicing chemistry teachers who participated in online discussions in different graduate courses. The chemistry teachers were required to answer course discussion posts and had the opportunity, while not required, to share their own resources. The purpose of this study was to examine what was shared between the chemistry teachers and why they valued the resources enough to share. Resources were labeled in different categories based on the general purpose or characterization they fell into. For example, a resource that outlined a demonstration would be labeled. Finally, characterization of why a chemistry teacher valued and shared a resource was identified. One reason found was a teacher listing a resource as something they found helped student growth. General analysis found that the teachers largely asked for resources to improve their teaching ability and shared specific material such as labs or activities that were beneficial to students.”
East Central IL ACS Undergraduate Research Conference
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Do you feel that these findings that Chemistry teachers were so willing and anxious to share resources are unique to Chemistry teachers or would be applicable to all teachers? Or how about people not in the teaching profession?
Hello!
In all honesty, I do not believe this was specific to just Chemistry teachers. For example, while all of the students in the classes were Chemistry teachers, they often also taught other subjects as well (biology, physics, etc.) This leads me to believe willingness to share goes beyond just Chemistry teachers. It is likely that if this type of examination was done but looking at comments from teachers of other subjects, a similar finding of willingness to share would be found. Naturally, the types of resources shared would change across disciplines but overall, teachers would likely follow a similar pattern.
As for people not in the profession, I found this to be a very interesting question. If we looked at just a group of practicing chemists, and gave them a prompt without telling them to share anything, I honestly do not know what the outcome would be! It is likely that they might look for different ways to improve their own practice(similar to teachers looking for tips and methods for the classroom), but the extent to which this group would search for and share resources is unclear. It would be an interesting study to look at!
Hi Luke. My name is Wilfred van der Donk (faculty at UIUC) and I just listened to your poster presentation. Well presented and on an important topic given all the resources available!
I had a few questions, some of which overlap with the questions that I see Aya posted. You may already have answered them (I am not sure if I would be able to see that or not). Just in case I cannot see such answers, I will post them here separately.
Do I understand correctly that you looked at three courses (the red, green and purple in your Fig 1)? Unfortunately I cannot read the legend of the figure (not your fault; simply a consequence of the format that we have to do this now). If so, can you tell us something about the enrolled students? I think these are probably 1st year graduate students, but what is the size of these classes and which graduate students take them? Similarly can you tell us something about the instructors (not their names, but their experience such as years in the job, type of appointment)? And how did you do the investigation? Did you e-mail the instructors before the course and then they updated you throughout the semester? Or did you use a survey after the course was completed? Will you run the investigation again in coming years to see if the outcome changes?
Thanks!
Wilfred
Hello!
Thank you for the comment. To begin, we did examine three different graduate level courses. They were all within the graduate catalog and are titled ACD Thermochemical Energy in the Chemistry Curriculum, ACD: Redox, Electrochemistry and Solutions, and ACD: Teaching Chemistry as an Experimental Science respectively. ACD stands for Advanced Chemistry Demonstrations. The enrolled students were practicing chemistry educators who were taking these courses to complete a masters degree in chemistry education. These courses are centered around educators who are specifically looking to complete these degrees. The class size varied but had around 19-22 students per class.
As for the instructors, there were three different instructors who taught each class during a different semester. All were employees of the university and had earned their Ph D in either chemistry, science education, and education. They all taught these courses through the Department of Chemistry at Illinois State University. I can not provide specifics for years on the job for all, but for one of the instructors, they had been working with the department for at least three years before teaching the course during the semester studied.
Finally, the investigation itself was unique. The project actually studied graduate level courses that had already taken place. For example, I personally came to ISU in the fall of 2018, but one course had taken place during the spring of 2018. The other two had also taken place before I arrived as an undergraduate student. Therefore, this was just an examination of the shared resources from a graduate course that had already taken place. As for the “updates”, what was mainly examined was different discussion posts. Throughout the semester the students had to complete discussion posts and respond to prompts. As I mentioned in the video, they were not required to share material, but most teachers did. This served as the raw data pulled from each class and further categorized into different codes. All IRB guidelines were followed during this investigation.
In the future, this investigation could be run again. Currently, we are not planning on running it for a little while. Due to the Coronavirus, if the investigation was run again at a later date, it would be interesting to see what materials the teachers still valued and how they changed due to the pandemic. This, of course, with any other changes in the valued material due to advances in technology, classroom pedagogy, etc.
I hope this helps!
Additionally, I am working on getting more information about the instructors today as Dr. Boesdorfer was the point person for this. I am reaching out so I can provide more information to you about the demographics!
Hello Again Wilfred,
I apologize for the late response, I just wanted to make sure I had the correct information about the facilitators. All three were tenure track faculty at Illinois State University. Please let me know if you have any questions.
You indicate that you would post the comments, but I do not see that. Where are these posted?
Hi!
The referenced document is now attached to the post under the transcript labeled “Presentation Code Description.” It should open as a separate page.
Best,
Rebecca Ulrich
Conference Co-chair
Hi!
First thank you for posting the code sheet! I had attached them to the YouTube page originally, but they must not have been transferred over. I hope that helps!
Hi Luke,
Interesting study— I have a few questions for you.
1) Who were your subjects? Did you conduct the survey at ISU only? What were the breakdown of your subjects in terms of tenured/pre-tenure/adjunct professors, instructor vs. research faculty?
2) What is the y-axis for Fig 1?
3) What is PhET simulation?
4) What do you hope to do with your research data?
Thanks,Aya
Hi Aya,
Thank you for the comment. For question 1, I am only going to be able to answer the first two questions as I am reaching out to Dr. Boesdorfer currently as she has the information you asked for about the “breakdown” of the instructors/professors/etc. For now, I do want to address that this examination was focused around classes that had already taken placed. The classes examined were from past semesters such as one that took place during the spring of 2018. Personally, I began my undergraduate studies in the fall of 2018, and therefore did not work with the chemistry educators directly. This was not a continuation of a project, rather just an examination of old courses from the last 5 years. As for the examination of the discussions, this was only taken from the graduate courses at ISU. No other institutions were apart of this examination. Further, the teachers themselves were in these courses as a part of their graduate programs to earn a degree in a chemistry education related field. They had a wide variety of teaching experience from 2 years to as many as 30 years. Some teachers had even already taken the course and mentioned they like taking the course again to learn more about updates and find new ideas.
As for question 2, the y axis in figure 1 is the number of times the code was referenced in the comment. This included both the comment prompting someone else to comment and share material. As well as the comment with just the shared material. These were tabulated and added together to make the bar diagram.
In relation to question 3, PhET simulations are these awesome online interactives that a lot of teachers use in their classrooms. The University of Colorado Boulder has published the site and basically when you choose the interactive, it brings up a site where you can manipulate the variables and see the outcomes. A favorite of mine is the potential energy PhET were you can change the distance between the atoms and see how potential energy changes as well. Here’s the link to the main site! https://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulations/filter?sort=alpha&view=grid
Finally, in the future, there are really two options for the data. I know in my personal career, I would love to be able to work with my colleagues and be able to talk about the material they value and find material that I value myself. I think this was a good foundation for myself especially, as I was able to start think about what types of materials would and would not work in my future classroom. As for the project itself, there could be another examination of newer graduate courses, with different students, and see what types of materials they share, if any. Please let me know if you have any more questions and I will get back to you asap about the demographics!
Hello Aya,
My apologies for the late response. I wanted to make sure I got you the correct information. All three facilitators of the classes were tenure-track faculty at Illinois State. I hope this helps!