For undergraduate students, active learning has been shown to result in greater learning gains, higher retention of information, improved attitudes, and increased motivation for future learning. Essential to active learning instruction is discussion and discourse, which allows students to develop higher order thinking skills and conceptual understanding through presenting and defending their ideas. Although a significant amount of research on the success of active learning environments has been completed, there is little evidence concerning how student attitudes towards chemistry and their self-concepts in chemistry change as they engage in specific activities that promote conceptual understanding in undergraduate general chemistry courses. To gain insight into how attitudes and self-concepts change in an undergraduate active learning classroom, this study conducted assessments of students who engaged in individual and small-group problem solving activities utilizing the claim-evidence-justification (CEJ) framework of constructing explanations. Students completed four CEJ activities over the course of a semester in which explanations of natural phenomena were constructed, consisting of a claim, evidence that supports the claim, and justification describing why the evidence supports the claim. Analysis revealed that students significantly shifted their affective profiles, composed of attitudes and self-concepts, after one semester of CEJ activities and that students who engaged in more structured interactions exhibited the highest affective profile shifts. The structured nature of the CEJ framework may have created an explicit social environment that promoted affective profile shifts. This suggests that specific interventions (outside of general active learning) that use explicit approaches, may impact other areas aside from content knowledge through social processes. Affective profiles of students, profile shifts, and correlation to overall performance in the course will be described. For instructors and researchers, this study suggests that focusing on specific activities within an active learning environment may improve attitudes and self-concepts of students in STEM classes.

Student attitudes and self-concepts in an active learning preparatory chemistry classroom utilizing the construction of explanations to promote understanding

255th National Meeting (2018)

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