A growing body of literature in chemistry education is uncovering student resources and challenges when engaging in chemical thinking and scientific practices at the college level. This literature suggests active, student-centered learning as an avenue towards improved student outcomes. However, less is known about how students learn chemical thinking in the moment when they actively engage in chemistry or other STEM courses, and how this learning can be facilitated successfully. The Caspari group's currently largest project in this research area centers around learning assistants’ facilitation of student in-the-moment learning during large enrollment introductory chemistry and physics lectures. The project uses a sociocultural perspective to model four dimensions of learning assistants’ facilitation practices: (1) the nature of learning assistants' facilitation, (2) their purposes, (3) student in-the-moment learning that occurs, and (4) the integration of the interactions into the whole class. To do so, multiple strands of data are being collected and qualitatively analyzed, including videos of learning assistant-student interactions and interviews with professors, learning assistants, and students. Results from this project will provide a theoretical basis to inform professional development for learning assistants and further systematic study of their practices. The combination of multiple sociocultural frameworks to study a complex learning phenomenon from multiple perspectives is novel to the field and will establish a precedent for further in-depth investigation of learning dynamics. This  work  is  supported  by  the  National  Science  Foundation,  award  DUE 2000603. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Organic chemistry is known for being a weed-out class at the introductory level. Many pre-health students describe it as the most challenging subject in their undergraduate career that requires endless memorization. At all levels of education, from introductory to graduate courses, organic chemistry has a reputation along the lines of “you either get it or you don’t”, “you love it or you hate it”, etc. While research has focused on various conceptual challenges students experience when learning organic chemistry, this issue is much deeper than mere conceptual learning. Thus, the Caspari group focuses on the relationships that students have with each other, the instructional system, and organic chemistry through the lens of power. We seek to understand mechanisms of disenfranchisement and empowerment of students in organic chemistry classes. One of our foundational research projects in this area investigates how power dynamics influence organic chemistry learning in small group interactions in introductory organic chemistry. Another project, a design-based research project in a graduate organic chemistry class, aims at empowering students through fostering mechanistic reasoning while simultaneously reframing privileged agreements of academia into ones that support wholeness, justice, and liberation. For instance, a shift from memorization to mechanistic reasoning requires overcoming “the privileged agreement of perfection” by developing comfort with not knowing, which honors students’ humanity and democratizes science. This research area will broaden knowledge about how equity and organic chemistry intersect during students’ learning experiences.

A major challenge in discipline-based education research is ensuring that what is actually happening during teaching and learning is captured by research, along with ensuring that this research actually informs practice. The Caspari group’s approach to this challenge is to partner with learning assistants and instructors to investigate and improve teaching and learning. These partnerships take various forms. In the above mentioned research projects (areas 1 & 2), we are intentional about the multiple perspectives that are part of the research, including theoretical perspectives, our perspectives, and, most importantly, the perspectives of our research participants. As part of the Institute for Learning and Instruction, we partner with instructors to investigate teaching and learning in their classrooms. Based on our research on learning assistant facilitation practices, we develop learning materials for training of learning assistants that we directly implement in the Tufts learning assistant pedagogy class and other professional development. We also work to develop learning assistants to be ethnographers who characterize how their own practice influences learning and equity at the university.