Postdoctoral Fellowship: STEMEdIPRF: The Longitudinal Development of Students' Cognitive and EpiSTEMological Knowledge about Bonding Models

The proposed project aims to serve the national interest by improving undergraduate student learning in chemistry. The project plans to look at students’ understanding of chemical bonding, a core concept in chemistry. The project is designed as a qualitative longitudinal study to provide insight into the strategies, approaches, and mechanisms students use when engaging in tasks that require them to reason, predict, and explain phenomena related to chemical bonding. The project hopes to understand how students develop and use knowledge about chemical bonding as they progress from introductory chemistry through more advanced organic chemistry. Two research aims will be addressed in this project: 1) to investigate the development of general and organic chemistry students’ understanding of bonding, and 2) to explore the interplay between students’ ideas and epistemological beliefs about bonding and bonding models. The project is guided by Coordination Class Theory, which frames cognition as a network of fine-grained knowledge elements that are activated in context by the salient features of a task, activity, or problem. Elements of the individual development plan, including training in research methodology, literature review and proposal writing, mentoring, and teaching are intended to support the PI’s career goal of becoming a tenure-track faculty member in a chemistry department. This project is funded by the STEM Education Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (STEM Ed PRF) program that aims to enhance the research knowledge, skills, and practices of recent doctorates in STEM, STEM education, education, and related disciplines to advance their preparation to engage in fundamental and applied research that advances knowledge within the field. 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.