Collaborative Research: A Research Practice Partnership for Designing Writing Tools to Support Epistemically Responsive Teaching in Undergraduate Chemistry

In chemistry classrooms, students are asked to use models to explain the behavior of matter, compare alternative explanations, and justify their reasoning. However, instructors often have limited tools for seeing how students are thinking about those models and for using that thinking to guide instruction. As a result, opportunities to deepen learning and help students participate in disciplinary reasoning are often missed. This project seeks to serve national interest by advancing scalable, writing-based strategies that help instructors elicit, interpret, and respond to students’ ideas. Working with twelve instructors across varied institutional contexts, the project will support instructional change in general and organic chemistry courses and position student thinking as a central resource for teaching. The project will produce research-based materials, including writing prompts, implementation guides, annotated examples of student reasoning, video cases, prompt-design tools, and faculty learning resources. These materials will help instructors use student writing not simply as a product to grade, but as evidence for making instruction more responsive to students’ developing understanding. Through these pathways, the project will advance the National Science Foundation’s goals of improving undergraduate STEM instruction, broadening participation in education innovation, and building infrastructure to support evidence-based teaching at scale. Responsive teaching is a well-established framework in K–12 science and mathematics education because it centers the substance of students’ ideas and supports instructional practices that build on those ideas. However, this approach is much less widely adopted in postsecondary STEM contexts, particularly in chemistry. Led by the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Michigan, this Level 3 NSF IUSE Engaged Student Learning project addresses this need through a multi-institutional research–practice partnership. The specific objectives of the partnership are to 1) co-develop writing-based formative assessments and instructional strategies designed to make students’ reasoning visible, interpretable, and actionable; 2) examine how instructors’ capacity to notice and respond to students’ conceptual and epistemic thinking develops through collaborative engagement; and 3) investigate how students experience instruction shaped by epistemically responsive teaching. To accomplish these objectives, the project team will use a design-based research approach to iteratively refine tools and teaching strategies across varied instructional contexts. Together with partnering instructors the team will design writing prompts around chemical phenomena (particularly those that can be explained or predicted using bonding models and structure-property relationships) to elicit both students’ conceptual ideas and their criteria for evaluating models and explanations. Through cycles of classroom implementation, collaborative analysis of student writing, instructor reflection, and student interviews, the project will generate usable innovations and theoretical insights that support sustained scalable shifts toward epistemically responsive instruction in undergraduate STEM. The project will contribute to chemistry education and the learning sciences by extending responsive teaching into undergraduate STEM; modeling how students’ conceptual and epistemic reasoning can inform instruction; examining how students use conceptual and epistemic resources in writing; investigating how instructors develop epistemic sensitivity; and articulating design principles that connect formative writing prompts with responsive teaching strategies. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. 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.