Student success has a lot to do with effective teaching and departmental policies that empower students of diverse backgrounds to discover and reach their full potential. iGen (people born after 1995) is the most diverse generation to enter higher education in our nation’s history, and so it is vital for educators to understand how students learn STEM subjects and develop a sense of belonging during an era of a loneliness epidemic, diminishing mental and emotional health, financial uncertainty, a global pandemic, and systemic injustice.
As the student population of higher education mirrors the nation’s existing and expanding diversity, the methods and policies at colleges and universities should also reflect diverse and collaborative attention, support, and action. Chemistry education research continues to reveal how students learn and the impact that emotional health has on the learning process. Disciplined-based education research (DBER) has emerged as a field that aims to transform and improve undergraduate education through implementing effective teaching practices, better assessments of learning, and investigates student thinking, learning, and difficulties on their path to becoming scientists and chemists.
Professor Gina Frey’s research investigates how to improve student learning and sense of belonging through developing, modifying, implementing, and evaluating active-learning and collaborative strategies, as well as cognitive, metacognitive, and social-psychological research findings. Collaboration is central to her interdisciplinary approach, as her colleagues are researchers in education, psychology, and sociology, as well as other STEM discipline-based education researchers.
Exemplar Learners & Abstraction Learners
In the early 2000s, Professor Frey began to collaborate with a cognitive psychology colleague who had identified two types of learners in his research: exemplars and abstractors. Exemplars learn based on the retention or memorization of homework examples, while abstractors learn to transfer skills that allow them to work through a problem based on the underlying chemistry principles. Professor Frey was keen to find a way to identify which of her students were exemplars and which were abstractors and find if there were interventions that educators could make in their methodologies to help students gain more transfer skills based on chemistry principles.
Professor Frey and her colleague implemented in classrooms an online program (developed by her colleague) that could help them differentiate between the two types of learners based on exam scores. Initially, they found that the abstractors were doing 4% better in general chemistry.
However, when they separated the exam questions into retention and transfer questions, they saw a much different picture.
Both sets of students were able to solve the retention questions, which simply require memorizing homework examples. However, there was a significant difference in the transfer questions where students had to stretch their thinking beyond the examples in the homework.
Those students who were able to rely on their knowledge of the underlying chemistry principles were able to find the solution, whereas the retention learners were unable to solve the transfer problems.
In a more recent pilot study, they also noticed a drastic difference between the two learners in General Chemistry courses versus Organic Chemistry courses. As the nature of Gen Chem classes is mathematically based, if a student has good math skills or at least is able to memorize the steps to solve a problem, they can get through Gen Chem with relative ease. However, the differences are more drastic in O Chem courses, where it becomes more like learning a language and solving problems is like writing an entire paragraph fluently in a new language. The student must have a fundamental understanding of how everything fits together.
Belonging: How Emotional and Social Realities Affect Learning
As Professor Frey went through her schooling, she always did well and excelled. However, it wasn’t until she co-taught a Women in Science class where she was “forced” to read feminine and gender theory literature that she realized all of the subconscious cognitive energy it took to be one of the very few women in a classroom, research lab, or as a member of the faculty. She didn’t realize until one of the books she read pointed out that when an individual enters a room and they start counting in their head, looking for others that look like them, she had been doing this throughout most of her education and career. This led her to an understanding that no matter what she did cognitively to learn chemistry and conduct meaningful research, there was still this social issue of feeling a sense of belonging.
She and her collaborators have recently published a paper that reveals that students who have a low sense of social belonging in the course are less likely to persist from Gen Chem I to Gen Chem II, despite their cognitive abilities. In an earlier study, they implemented a growth-mindset strategy in Gen Chem I. While they did not see a difference in women’s performance in the course, they did see a difference in underrepresented BIPOC students. Between the control and experiment groups, there was a 5% difference in their finals, and the underrepresented students were at a -5% difference before they even started the final. Some of the interventions that can occur are to vocalize to underrepresented students that they are not the only ones questioning their social belonging. The student’s sense of belonging is especially crucial at transition points. For this reason, Professor Frey loves teaching Gen Chem, because she gets to interact with students at the threshold of a big transition in their lives. She does her best to vocalize that the students in her classes do indeed belong in chemistry, and she constantly reminds everyone that struggling is a natural part of learning and that all questions are valid. Making women and BIPOC scientists more visible throughout their educational experience can go a long way to encourage students to persist, to feel that they belong, and to contribute their diverse perspectives to the chemistry community to impact the progress and impact of research for their generation and generations to come.