<br/>As a gateway to STEM, Chemistry Education Research (CER) has a moral imperative to progress toward more equitable student engagement with the sciences. While efforts to reform classrooms are ongoing, quantitative methods used in research can further propagate the marginalization and minoritization of specific student groups. This leads to the question “Can quantitative methods, long critiqued for their inability to capture the nuance of everyday oppression, support and further an equity agenda in CER overall?” Here, we present advancements in the framework of QuantCrit published across education research. While QuantCrit introduced 5 tenets toward identifying and avoiding oppressive quantitative practices, few works in CER employ tenants of QuantCrit resulting in “hyperpersitent” gap-gazing and deficit-oriented interpretations of student-level data that continue to marginalize specific student groups, despite best intentions. One of the barriers to applying QuantCrit is that it is hard to find advice on how to apply the principles empirically and how to make sure these principles are consistent with the researcher’s chosen theoretical framework. To support initiatives in CER seeking to transition to more equitable quantitative methods, suggestions for applying principles of QuantCrit to CER will be discussed.

Recognizing the potential harm of quantitative methods to marginalized populations: Embracing QuantCrit in the field of CER

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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