Shifts in chemistry education are pressing learners and educators to better prepare learners to participate in the STEM workforce. Successfully preparing students for these demanding careers requires more than a small tweak to traditional classroom practice by chemistry educators. The purpose of the PDConnect is to build and study an online community in which educators work together to meet these challenges. To accomplish this, we are engaging in design research that builds on and advances teacher professional development and social computing with a community-centric approach to teacher change. In collaboration with College Board, we will correlate student scores to teacher involvement in the PDConnect, to conduct a large-scale, national, fully-powered experimental study of the impact of PDConnect on student achievement. The proposed intervention is a scalable, online professional development community for AP Chemistry teachers. A comprehensive collection of resources will serve as a meeting ground for teacher interactions, but the interactions themselves are the focus of both our site design and our research agenda. The goal is to support and characterize the spread of teacher beliefs and practices within intimate, online professional circles. In this presentation, we will share our progress to date, include the design of the online community and recruitment of our initial cohort of chemistry teachers.

PDConnect: Scalable community approach to improving instruction in AP Chemistry nationwide

2019 Fall National Meeting

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.