Educators should strive to understand the interplay between different classroom pedagogies and the beliefs about knowledge and learning held by their students. This seminar will present a comparison of survey data for learners in two different types of first-semester organic chemistry classrooms: an active learning format classroom and a predominantly lecture-based classroom. Students in both types of classrooms completed surveys assessing their personal epistemology (beliefs about knowledge and how it is formed) and perceptions of constructivism in the classroom at three time points during the semester. One of our goals in this experiment was to examine relationships, if any, between epistemic beliefs and epistemic climate (classroom pedagogy) in an authentic, semester-long learning environment. Using a quasi-experimental design, we evaluated the effects of epistemic climate (passive lecture versus active/constructive) on students’ perceptions of constructivism and changes in personal epistemology over time. We also tested the alignment hypothesis: that students will perform better on assessments when their beliefs align with the pedagogy employed by the instructor. This was assessed by student performance on a common final exam. Although the active learning, constructivist classroom environment did not seem to affect personal epistemology, evidence suggested that perceptions of a complex learning environment did predict changes in personal epistemology. Furthermore, students’ initial epistemic beliefs predicted how the classroom environment was perceived by those learners, and students generally did better on the final exam when their beliefs about knowledge aligned closely with the pedagogy employed during classes. Learners with constructivist beliefs about knowledge performed better on the assessment if they had been in the active learning (POGIL) classroom, while learners with a strongly "authority-based" justification of knowledge performed better on the same assessment when they had been enrolled in a predominantly lecture-format class. Findings support an interactive model between students’ personal epistemology and epistemic climate and highlight the challenges of changing epistemic beliefs through short-term classroom interventions.

How do learner beliefs about knowledge affect performance in an active-learning organic chemistry class?

2019 Spring National Meeting

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