Within high school classrooms, chemistry teaching is generally not aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards. This could be attributed to the complexity of reasoning across different representational levels and the instructional challenges teachers face when communicating such information. To enhance high school teachers’ chemistry knowledge and instructional quality, our research consists of a professional development (PD) program. Known as the VisChem Institute (VCI), our program leverages the cognitive learning model and foregrounds sensemaking using molecular visualizations. The VCI positions teachers as learners of chemistry and of pedagogy as they initially storyboard phenomena at the molecular level and later create their own VisChem-inspired learning design activities. Prior PD research has typically evaluated participants’ conceptual understanding or pedagogical knowledge independently. Fewer studies, however, have qualitatively analyzed the relationships between artifacts produced by teachers as both learners of chemistry and of pedagogy to understand their overall experiences. Our exploratory investigation seeks to answer these research questions: (1) How do high school chemistry teachers’ storyboards and learning design activities change throughout the VCI? (2) To what extent and in what ways are high school chemistry teachers’ storyboards and learning design activities connected? Inductive and deductive coding of storyboards and activities incorporates principles from model-based instruction and the cognitive learning model that informed the PD design. While early findings suggest that participants have improved the quality of their storyboards by including more details such as the influence of bulk water, epistemic practices of modeling require further analysis as evidenced by teachers’ learning design activities. Specifically, participants may view a VisChem visualization as a medium for knowledge transmission as opposed to a tool for student-centered sensemaking. Results and implications for PD and chemistry teaching will be presented.

Understanding high school chemistry teachers as both learners of chemistry and pedagogy: Comparing artifacts from different roles in professional development

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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