Collaborative Research: Transforming Organic Chemistry Instruction through Faculty Workshops and a Community of Practice

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This project aims to serve the national interest by improving undergraduate chemistry education. To do so, it will support a growing community of practice that aims to improve student learning in organic chemistry. The project team’s overall goal is to make organic chemistry more accessible to students and transform how it is taught. It intends to achieve this goal by hosting a series of faculty workshops and providing online access to exemplar learning materials. The workshops are intended to increase the implementation of evidence-based instructional practices among organic chemistry instructors. Workshop participants will learn and practice teaching techniques that involve students actively in constructing knowledge as opposed to traditional “sit and get” lectures. Additional activities include efforts to sustain the effects of the workshop, disseminate results, and broaden the faculty community of practice. Specific activities include online faculty learning communities, mini-workshops, symposia at national meetings, newsletters, and publishing a book with detailed reports of classroom implementations of novel pedagogies. In addition to improving undergraduate organic chemistry education, this project has the potential to enhance understanding about the role of communities of practice in promoting instructional improvements. The overarching goal of this project is to improve student learning and outcomes in organic chemistry. This proposal plans to achieve this goal by increasing faculty awareness of evidence-based instructional practices through Active Learning in Organic Chemistry workshops, assisting faculty with implementation, expanding the community of practice, fostering the development of educational resources, coordinating ongoing faculty learning communities, examining the effectiveness of workshops, and revising the workshops to increase their effectiveness. The project team and workshop participants will generate active learning materials and post them on the Organic Education Resources website (https://www.organicers.org/) so they can be used by anyone, including organic chemistry instructors. The project will apply and study two theories of change: Roger's Diffusion of Innovation Theory and the Theory of Planned Behavior. The project’s education research component will examine (1) the process of change in teaching practices among workshop participants, (2) how a community of practice for organic chemistry instructors evolves, (3) factors that facilitate or impede transformation in teaching practices, and (4) best practices for sustaining a community of practice. Formative assessment of the workshops will be used for continuous improvement of the workshops throughout the course of the award. This project is supported by the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program: Education and Human Resources, which supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools to understand how institutions change to better support student 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.