Analogies are used to make abstract topics meaningful and more easily comprehensible to learners. Incorporating simple analogies into STEM classrooms is a fairly common practice, but the analogies are typically generated and explained by the instructor for the learners. We hypothesize that challenging learners to create complex, extended analogies…

Clinically integrated curricula in health science education has been shown to promote the development of problem-solving schema and positively impact knowledge acquisition. Despite its' purported benefits, this type of curricula can impose a high cognitive load, which may negatively impact novice learners' knowledge acquisition and problem-solving…

Although principles and practices of green and sustainable chemistry have been articulated for more than 20 years, they have yet to become systemically infused into the undergraduate chemistry curriculum. The American Chemical Society Green Chemistry Institute (ACS GCI) has convened stakeholders from across the chemistry education community to…

Background: Dataset skills are used in STEM fields from astronomy to zoology. Few fields explicitly teach students the skills to analyze datasets, and yet the increasing push for authentic science implies these skills should be taught. Purpose: The overarching motivation of this work is to understand authentic science learning of STEM dataset…

Much work has been done to characterize the reasoning of students as they solve mathematics-intensive problems and characterizing differences in expert and novice problem solving. In this work, we characterize the problem-solving strategies in a classroom setting of "transitioning novices," students who have completed an introductory…

Collaboration between chemistry lecturers and literacy lecturers led to the development and implementation of an interdisciplinary project with the object of addressing two pertinent challenges in chemistry education. The first challenge is the tendency of students to approach different topics in science as separate units of knowledge, which…

To be able to design a laboratory course it is important to know what laboratory skills students possess before the course starts. This way the course can focus on developing skills in areas that are lacking. Despite the extensive literature on laboratory education, there are few studies on what laboratory skills students have at this stage of…

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed many aspects of our world including the way we teach chemistry. Our emergence from the pandemic provides an opportunity for deep reflection and intentional action about what we teach, and why, as well as how we facilitate student learning. Focusing on foundational postsecondary chemistry courses, we…

Visuals (maps, charts, diagrams and illustrations) are an important tool for communication in most scientific disciplines, which means that scientists benefit from having strong visual communication skills. This dissertation examines the nature of competence in visual communication and the means by which scientists acquire this competence. This…

The development of fields such as bioinformatics and genomics has created new challenges and opportunities for undergraduate biology curricula. Students preparing for careers in science, technology, and medicine need more intensive study of bioinformatics and more sophisticated training in the mathematics on which this field is based. In this…

Undergraduate science education curricula are traditionally composed of didactic instruction with a small number of laboratory courses that provide introductory training in research techniques. Research on learning methodologies suggests this model is relatively ineffective, whereas participation in independent research projects promotes enhanced…