Collaborative Research: Longitudinal Impact of Peer-Led Team Learning on Retention of Chemistry Concepts and Attitudes toward Chemistry

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Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) is a teaching method that relies on students who successfully completed a course (known as "peer leaders") to return to the course to lead new students in small group learning activities. A strength of this approach is that it can be used in large introductory college science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses. As a result, PLTL has been implemented at more than one hundred colleges and universities nationwide. Research studies have found that PLTL promotes student academic success more effectively than lecture-based teaching alone. However, most of this research has only examined PLTL's impacts within a single course. Thus, little is known about the impacts of PLTL on students' long-term retention of knowledge and skills. Therefore, this Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE: EHR) Exploration & Design project will fill an important research gap by investigating the extent to which PLTL supports long-term retention of chemistry knowledge and skills, in comparison to lecture-based instruction. Because learning is also affected by students' motivation and attitudes, the project will also measure these factors. The studies will be carried out at the University of South Florida (USF), the University of Central Florida (UCF), the University of New Hampshire (UNH), and the University of Southern Maine (USM). The results of these studies have the potential to inform college chemistry instructors regarding how to promote and evaluate long-term student retention of knowledge and skills.The project will investigate the longitudinal impact of PLTL on general chemistry knowledge retention using two concurrent approaches. In the first approach, the project team will assess students' knowledge in upper-level quantitative analysis courses as a function of whether or not they participated in PLTL in their general chemistry courses. Instructors at USF, UCF, UNH, and USM will collaborate with the research team to create assessment items for general chemistry concepts that are central to understanding quantitative analysis. In addition to more traditional exam questions, novel Creative Exercises (CEs) will be used. CEs consist of prompts that ask students to write as many related statements as they can that are distinct, correct, and relevant. This generative assessment approach is designed to reveal both correct and incorrect associations students construct with the prompts. A course-entry survey will identify students in the quantitative analysis courses who had been involved in PLTL as a student or peer leader in general chemistry, and determine the nature of their learning experiences in and out of the classroom. A second approach will be a longitudinal comparison study, for which students will be recruited at the end of their general chemistry course. Students will be asked to respond to assessments of their general chemistry knowledge and skills at the end of the course and twice more within the following two-year period. The combination of the quasi-experimental in-vivo approach and experimental in vitro approach will help balance the relative advantages and disadvantages of each research approach. In addition, other relevant student measures, including of motivation, metacognition, attitudes, and self-concept as chemistry learners, will be collected and analyzed. These data will be used to disaggregate or cluster sub-populations of students for statistical or descriptive comparisons. Results from the project are expected to provide insights regarding the long-term value of PLTL for students and peer leaders, create novel content knowledge assessments for general chemistry and analytical chemistry, and provide guidance to instructional designers regarding the aspects of PLTL that are most valuable for learning.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.