Less than 30 days to the Biennial Conference on Chemical Education. It will be a great time to hear about all that is going on with the ChemistryOnScreen project. There will be 2 talks (one by me, one by Jessie Sundland) and one poster (by Mya Hastings). So, if you are there, you should be sure to come out and learn about our cool work. You can also check out the www.chemistryonscreen.com website. It has gone through some significant rennovations!
There are plenty of opportunities to learn about the Chemistry On Screen project at the Spring ACS meeting. We have 2 poster at the DivCHED poster session on Sunday March 22nd from 12-2. Later that day, we have Jessie Stenlund talking about her work of applying the framework to resonance as viewed in organic chemistry at 4:20pm on Sunday. Lastly, Debbie Herrington will be talking about the project at 3:55 on Monday.
I am quite pleased to have the (likely) final paper on the SPRING/STEM scholars program out in the world. This one was many years in coming for oh so many reasons. Congratulations to lead author Merve Kursav (former SUTL fellow) and co-author Sean Valles. You can read about this work here.
A really great overview paper titled “Centering Student Perspectives and Equity Data in a Multi-Institutional Learning Community Program” was just recently published in To Improve the Academy from the SELC project. It was great to put this paper together with Nita Tarchinski and Tom Colclough. However, there were many people who helped make the paper possible as can be seen from the full author list (below). Thanks to everyone for their work on this. I should note that this paper was part of the SEISMIC Project work.
Additional authors: Ashley Atkinson, Emily Bonem, Nathan Emery, Victoria S. Farrar, Madeleine Gonin, Daniel Guberman, Eleanor Louson, Matthew Mahavongtrakul, Timothy A. McKay, Marco Molinaro, Meryl Motika, Lizette Muñoz Rojas, Hurshal Pol, Kem Saichaie, Kelsey Smart, Megan Stowe, Natasha T. Turman, Jenna Vest
It has been a bit of a slog, but finally we go the first version of the Chemistry On Screen project webpage up. You can find it at www.ChemistryOnScreen.com. It is still a bit rough, but there is now something to see. Revisions/additions will be forthcoming.
I’m expecting several presentations that will be happening this summer. I’ll be kicking off the summer with a presentation to the Princeton division of ACS in an online webinar. Next will be presenting a poster at the Gordon Research Conference focused on Chemistry Education Research and Practice. I anticipate that my students will then be presenting their work at Mid-Sure. Lastly, we’ll wrap up the summer with a presentation at the ACS meeting in DC.
I’m very excited to share that our work on the NSF Funded SELC project as part of SEISMIC will have an upcoming publication. A manuscript, primarily written by Nita Kedharnath, Tom Colclough, and me, was recently accepted by To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development. We are expecting a publication date in September.
There are a few moments where you really feel that your you can see some of the impact of your career. For me that really came to a head at the ACS meeting this spring. I was excited to see all three of my undergrads who have done work with me and gone on to work toward their Chemistry Education Research PhD together at one meeting. Below we have a great picture of Shanna (3rd year) and Bri (4th year). I also was able to meet up with Kathleen and her give a wonderful talk as part of Chris Bauer’s award ceremony.
Ryan will have a couple of talks upcoming. The first will be as part of the Sydney Basin conference for STEM education (Feb 3rd). He also has talks scheduled at the University of New South Wales, University of Sydney, and the University of Queensland. Toward the end of March, his students will be presenting their work at the ACS Spring 2025 National meeting. They will then reprise their presentation at Michigan State’s UURAF and GVSU’s Student Scholars’ Day in April.
I’m really excited to share that my video project (collaborative with Debbie Herrington) got our first publication out. The paper entitled “Is this a helpful YouTube video? A research-based framework for evaluating and developing conceptual chemistry instructional videos” can be found in the Journal of Chemical Education. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.4c01085 It is an open access publication, so should be available to all. In the paper, we highlight the key components of how we do our video analysis of YouTube videos. We hope that it will be useful for both instructors and for students (what should I be looking for in a video?) This is a first step and hopefully we will get a website up on the project later this year.
