First generation college (FGC) students constitute a third of the US undergraduate student body, but are widely shown to be underserved in college education. FGC students are more likely to leave college than continuing generation college (CGC) students and experience challenges such as being “less well prepared academically”, and having limited access to resources to navigate college (Cataldi et al., 2018; Chen, 2005; Collier and Morgan, 2008). In particular, it has been shown that FGC students have higher DFWI rates in gateway chemistry courses compared to CGC students, and higher DWFI rates are correlated with a higher chance of leaving college (Koch and Drake, 2017). Thus, gateway courses such as general chemistry are important sites to support the success of FGC students. In this work, we describe our insights from an intervention to improve classroom experiences and outcomes for FGC students in a general chemistry course at a large urban university where 40% of the undergraduate student body is first generation. The design of our intervention was motivated by work on ‘cultural mismatch’ that FGC students may face, namely a mismatch between the ‘independent’ norms of US college culture and ‘interdependent’ norms that FGC students are accustomed to at home (Orbe, 2008; Stephens et al., 2012; White et al., 2021). Based on these findings and the well known benefits of cooperative learning (Warfa, 2016), we incorporated weekly group work in a traditionally lecture style class and redesigned quizzes to have a group work portion. We attempt to understand the impact of this intervention through one-on-one semi-structured interviews with FGC students on their perception of the general chemistry classroom in the context of their general undergraduate STEM experience. In particular, we focus on how such an intervention supports FGC students’ learning and their experience of the learning environment.

Insights from intervention to support first generation college student success in general chemistry

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ACS Fall 2022

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