Unpacking the complexity of learning chemistry: an examination of student discourse in introductory chemistry

Learning environments that facilitate students to actively engage with content have been shown to promote learning across the science fields. These engaging learning environments help students interact with content more regularly, which supports students’ in making more meaningful connections with the world around them. However, facilitating these environments can be challenging and instructors could benefit from additional supports in getting students engaged in undergraduate science courses. My work qualitatively analyzes student conversations, classroom materials, and instructor facilitation in an active learning introductory undergraduate chemistry course to provide insights into how we can better support instructors and students.

Student conversations were analyzed across multiple classes and compared to the classroom materials they worked on during these periods. From this analysis it was found that the materials provided to students overall supported collaborative and cognitively engaged student conversations on chemical concepts. However, the supportive nature of these materials had the potential to be completely dismantled, as seen in the analysis of student engagement in comparison to the facilitation of these classrooms by graduate teaching assistants. Given the major facilitation role graduate teaching assistants held, it was found their engagement with students either provided additional support to the course materials provided or shut down any sort of student engagement by continually talking and/or skipping assigned tasks. For this reason, a major implication of this work is designing better facilitator trainings that support graduate teaching assistants in helping students engage in introductory chemistry.