Developing Expertise in Survey Design to Identify Advancements for Effectiveness and Excellence in Chemistry Instructional Laboratories

About This Grant

This BCSER Individual Investigator Development (IID) project will investigate course, department and institutional variables that influence teaching assistants (TA) instructional behavior in undergraduate chemistry laboratory courses. The PI will conduct think-aloud interviews with chemistry laboratory TAs that would be used to design a survey to unpack systems that affect TA instructional behavior. The survey will be implemented nationally across various institutional types. The findings from the surveys can provide insights into TA interactions in chemistry laboratory courses, thereby supporting TA training reform and positively impact undergraduate students enrolled in these courses. The findings will be shared through the facilitation of workshops, presentations at chemistry specific conferences that will impact practitioners and researchers, and journal publications. This project will build the Principal Investigator's capacity to carry out high-quality STEM education research, with the goal of improving the experiences of students in general chemistry laboratory courses. By exploring how TAs’ noticing opportunities for meaningful learning, specifically moments that invite all students to engage with chemistry in terms of the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor dimensions, the project will allow the PI to develop foundational skills and gain practical experience in designing and implementing cutting edge STEM education research using innovative methods and tools. The PI will develop new expertise in survey development and analysis, factor analysis and Hierarchical Linear Modeling. The PI will work with a mentor in quantitative methods and survey design and an advisory board. The PI will apply these quantitative research methods to design a survey instrument to assess the interactions of TAs in the chemistry laboratory. The success of this project will be assessed through the PI's interaction with an external advisory board. The project is supported by NSF's EDU Core Research Building Capacity in STEM Education Research (ECR: BCSER) program, which is designed to build investigators' capacity to carry out high-quality STEM education research. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.