As enrollment numbers for the introductory chemistry and physics courses reach around 600 students each this semester, the need to understand how students learn in STEM classes only becomes more crucial.
While typical bench research is a major focus at Tufts, the university also hosts many faculty members researching science, technology, engineering and math education — a topic that directly impacts every student taking STEM courses at any level of academia.
Professor Ira Caspari-Gnann, a member of both the chemistry and education departments, and her lab examine how chemistry learning — as well as STEM learning, more broadly — happen in the moment. That includes studying lectures and problem-solving sessions when learning is actively being facilitated.
In order to research active learning in the classroom, her lab records and later transcribes discussions between learning assistants, professors and students. Additionally, a researcher sits in on the class to observe and take notes on general classroom dynamics. After discussions are recorded, students and instructors may be interviewed to understand how they were thinking about learning in that instance.
Caspari noted one interaction between students and a learning assistant that her lab looked at: “We showed it to the students as a group, and we showed it to the professor teaching the class and then external researchers also looked at it,” Caspari said. “Everybody had a different opinion on whether they’re learning and why they’re learning.”
To measure whether students are learning, Caspari looks for “continuity” and “discourse change” in a conversation. For continuity, she monitors ideas throughout a conversation to see if they are connecting with each other as well as with students’ perspectives. On the other hand, discourse change is when new ideas are brought into the discussion and developed.
As a member of the chemistry department, Caspari has taught many classes, including general and organic chemistry, and she’s been able to implement active learning strategies in her classroom as a participant in her own study.
Caspari deduced from research on her own class is that the learning assistants were guiding students to answers more than she intended. These assistants are undergraduate students who have previously taken the course and whose role is to help facilitate learning and to be an approachable figure for students to talk to.
Caspari has since adapted her facilitation methods so that learning assistants are less solution-oriented and more process-oriented. “I changed my setup. And then, in the next data collection, we actually saw that the facilitation that we’re doing on the student learning was also changing,” Caspari said.
Caspari also looks at problem design and how that can change the learning process. Particularly, she is focused on how the format of a question can be changed so that, instead of there being just one correct answer, students can reason through the problem in multiple ways.
Caspari uses the flipped classroom model to have more productive small group discussions. Before using this model, she spent more class time explaining and lecturing.
“That was mirroring, or showing, what the expectation was as a whole. So then in the small groups, they weren’t really exploring either,” Caspari said. “So I shifted to do more … whole class discussions where I hear several different ways of reasoning. And then I work out of like, ‘What works in this one, what works in this one, how do we put that together to actually solve the problem?’”
Caspari is also trying to strike a balance in her classrooms between exploration of ideas and explaining the answer to a problem.
“It’s a lecture-to-lecture base. … [Sometimes in lecture we] really went into exploring things, and students really started to value their own ideas, and we [brought] in multiple perspectives. But then I’m like, ‘Okay, next lecture, I’ll also need to make sure that students are developing an understanding for these things,’” Caspari said.
Students also need time to figure out a balance when introduced to this flipped classroom model, as it can seem like watching pre-recorded lecture videos outside of class is more work than the typical problem set. To combat this, Caspari will often set up meetings to discuss the format and how to manage it.
“We talk about how ultimately they’re not spending more time working by themselves on things, because I’m doing much shorter problem sets,” Caspari said. “So, a student doesn’t spend more time on [this] class than in a traditional class. It’s just now, more problem-solving is in class, and more listening to explanations is out of class.”
Outside of chemistry, researchers in the physics department are also studying how students learn.
Miguel Vasquez-Vega, a third-year graduate student in the physics department, studies how “unscoring” practices in classes affect a student’s ability to make sense of what they’re learning. His research was inspired by a desire to improve the way people learn — beyond the traditional lecture-style format of physics classes.
“Learning is not just absorbing information from somebody who knows to somebody who doesn’t know,” Vasquez-Vega said. “It’s more about creating a lot of connections between what you already know in what you’re learning in whatever subject it is.”
By observing how students are able to create connections within material they are learning, Vasquez-Vega is able to gain insight on how students are understanding the material at hand.
“I particularly am studying and trying to understand how students show evidence of them making sense of what they’re saying on their responses to, say, problem set or homework assignments,” Vasquez-Vega said.
Through teaching Physics 11 with Professor Hugh Gallagher, he’s been working on seeing how “unscoring” practices, specifically, affect these learning outcomes. The rationale behind unscoring is twofold: to allow students to focus more on the learning than the grade, and to give instructors and TAs more time to discuss how to approach learning subjects in class — instead of how to divvy up points on an exam.
Measuring whether learning outcomes are still comparable with unscoring, though, is not so simple. “It’s a lot of conversations, a lot of philosophical conversations, about what it means to explore, what it means to make sense, what it means for a student to to engage in these practices that we want them to be engaging in,” Vasquez-Vega said.
Unlike typical grading rubrics, he develops the rubrics for evaluating student learning in his research, not based on whether an answer is right or wrong, but rather based on the engagement and sense-making present in students’ responses.
In the end, Vasquez-Vega emphasized the importance of doing this STEM education research and changing the perception of learning physics: “We want to … transform that idea that people have of physics as a subject that you learn and more as a tool to make sense of the world around you.”
Even beyond the world of physics, he has discovered that the ways we learn have broad applications.
“It’s so pretty and so useful to understand how the world around you works, and I’m talking about physics. But it can also be like how the social world around you works, how the political world around you works, how the psychological world around you, the biological world around you works,” Vasquez-Vega said. “I think it’s so useful and awesome to understand better how to move through the world or how the world moves around you.”
Caspari echoed the critical impact of education research in STEM classes: “It’s so central because we’re working with humans. We’re not working with chemicals or physics experiments or something. We are working with humans. So we do need to understand how humans are, how students are learning and what they need to help them learn.”
