The Chemistry Education Discourse Archive (CEDAr) is a repository of audio and video recordings, transcripts, and classroom artifacts documenting learning processes during small-group active learning activities in undergraduate General Chemistry. The materials in CEDAr were collected as part of an NSF-funded research study titled “Understanding the Role of Student Engagement in Active Learning Outcomes in General Chemistry through Discourse Analysis” (NSF #2120843), and data were collected under Portland State University IRB protocol #217.
CEDAr is intended as a resource for research that focuses on student talk in classroom settings and is likely to be of particular interest to researchers in chemistry education, applied linguistics, and other fields that investigate the role of small-group interactions in the learning process. In addition, the recordings and transcripts may be useful in the training of graduate researchers who are learning to use discourse analysis or as part of the training materials for learning assistants who will be facilitating small-group activities in large-format classes.
The materials in CEDAr were collected over a three-year period in large-format General Chemistry courses enrolling around 200 students per term. The dataset focuses on one to two student groups per class session, each of which ranges in size from two to five students. In many cases, there are two video angles per group in addition to an audio-only recording that provides better sound quality than the video recordings. Transcripts are available for all recordings. Scans of the activity worksheets that the participants completed during the activity are also included for most participants. The files in CEDAr have been deidentified to remove participant names and other personally identifying information, and each participant has been given a pseudonym.
The materials in CEDAr focus on three active learning activities that were conducted each term of data collection, each of which lasted for the entire class period (1 hour and 50 minutes per class session). The activities cover the following topics, which were spread out over the course of the term:
· Periodic Trends
· Solutions and Dilutions
· Molecular Polarity
The activities were designed by one of the course instructors based on the POGIL learning cycle (Farrell et al., 1999). Blank versions of the activity worksheets as well as answer keys are available for each of the activities.
Please complete the Google Form below to request access to CEDAr files. In your request, you will need to provide the following:
1) A list of the folders you would like to access. See the catalog below for more information on what is available. You can find additional information in the “Read Me” file.
Click HERE to access the Google Form
Click HERE to access the Catalog of files
Click HERE to access the Read Me file
2) Either a) an approved IRB protocol if the files will be used for research purposes, or b) confirmation that the recordings will be used exclusively for training purposes. Because participants’ faces are visible in the video recordings, you will need to provide evidence of an approved IRB protocol before accessing the data if you plan to use it for research purposes.
Please contact Alissa Hartig (ahartig@pdx.edu) and Jack Barbera (jbarbera@pdx.edu) with any questions.
Please use the following reference to cite CEDAr:
Hartig, A. J., & Barbera, J. (2025). The Chemistry Education Discourse Archive (CEDAr). https://sites.google.com/pdx.edu/barbera-cer/cedar
You may also wish to consult the following studies, which report on data collected as part of CEDAr:
El-Mansy, S. Y., Stephens, A., Mortensen, A., Francis, J. M., Feldman, S., Sahnow, C. A., Barbera, J., & Hartig, A. J. (2024). Factors affecting individuals’ cognitive engagement during group work in General Chemistry: Timing, group size, and question type. Chemistry Education Research and Practice, 25, 799 - 814. https://doi.org/10.1039/D3RP00279A
El-Mansy, S. Y., Barbera, J., & Hartig, A. J. (2022). Investigating small-group cognitive engagement in general chemistry learning activities using qualitative content analysis and the ICAP framework. Chemistry Education Research and Practice, 23, 335-347. https://doi.org/10.1039/D1RP00276G
If you publish research based on CEDAr, please let us know! We would love to highlight your work here.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2120843. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Farrell, J. J., Moog, R. S., & Spencer, J. N. (1999). A Guided-Inquiry General Chemistry Course. Journal of Chemical Education, 76(4), 570. https://doi.org/10.1021/ed076p570