Professional development that bridges gaps between educational research and practice is needed. However, bridging gaps can be difficult because teachers and educational researchers often belong to different Communities of Practice, as their activities, goals, and means of achieving those goals often differ. Meaningful collaboration among teachers and educational researchers can create a merged Community of Practice in which both teachers and educational researchers mutually benefit. A collaboration of this type is described that centered on investigating students' abilities to apply chemical thinking when engaged in authentic tasks. We describe the design-based principles behind the collaboration, the work of the collaborative team, and a self-evaluation of results interpreted through a Communities-of-Practice perspective, with primary focus on the teachers' perceptions. Analysis revealed ways in which teachers' assessments shifted toward more research-based practice and ways in which teachers navigated the research process. Implications for affordances and constraints of such collaborations among teachers and educational researchers are discussed.

Cultivating institutional transformation has been of recent interest in education research. This theoretical paper presents six principles for supporting sustained change efforts at the department level. Considering change efforts at the level of "principles" is valuable because principles are grounded in theoretical and empirical knowledge, but are abstract enough to be adapted to many contexts. For each principle we argue for its value, drawing on previous literature in higher education, organizational change, discipline-based education research, and design thinking. We then give illustrative examples of how each principle was embodied within the Departmental Action Team (DAT) project. The DAT project facilitates the implementation of effective changes within university science, technology, engineering, and mathematics departments. We conclude with a discussion of how these principles can be applicable across a variety of institutional transformation efforts.

There is a pressing need to improve the sustainability of educational improvement efforts, but sustainability remains undertheorized in science education. In this article, we draw upon frameworks from organizational culture and sustainability to characterize change within a single undergraduate science department. This in-depth longitudinal case study over 15 years provides careful documentation of the types of changes that are required to make improvements over time. In particular, we argue that cultural shifts are an important aspect of sustainable improvements. As we show, even a department that was considered an educational improvement "success story" was unable to sustain the improvements made through its initial effort. Nonetheless, we do argue that the initial effort resulted in shifts to multiple aspects of the department's culture (e.g., ways of thinking, the status of education in the department), that we characterize with Bolman and Deal's four frames. These cultural shifts provided the groundwork for a later effort, to ultimately create sustainable structures in the department resulting in sustained improvement. To conclude, we provide recommendations for how to improve the sustainability of change efforts and describe important methodological considerations for future studies of sustainability.

No abstract

No abstract

Making decisions about the production and use of chemical substances is of central importance in many fields. In this study, a research team comprising teachers and educational researchers collaborated in collecting and analyzing cognitive interviews with students from 8th grade through first-year university general chemistry in an effort to map progression in students' ability to make decisions about the consequences of using and producing chemicals. Study participants were asked to explain their reasoning about which fuel would be best to power a small vehicle. Data were analyzed using a "chemical thinking" lens to characterize conceptual sophistication and complexity of reasoning. Results revealed that most reasoning was intuitive in conceptual sophistication and relational in argumentative nature, driven by the consequences of using the fuels based on their composition. Implications are discussed for the design of learning experiences and assessments that better support students' development of decision-making using chemical knowledge.

No abstract

Chemical identity, the idea that every substance has at least one property that makes it unique and able to be differentiated from other substances, is core to the practice of chemistry. Such practice requires using properties to classify as well as to differentiate. Learning which substance properties are productive in chemical identity thinking is not easy, however, because many features of substances compete for a learner’s attention. Assessments that utilize open-ended questions can reveal ways that students use chemical identity thinking to classify and differentiate substances. On the basis of our previously published hypothetical learning progression of chemical identity, we developed a set of four open-ended questionnaires, which can be used to uncover students’ chemical identity thinking. In attending to literature on the development of qualitative research instruments, as well as design-based instructional materials development frameworks, a four-phase process of development was generated that integrally considers four sets of stakeholders: students, teachers, educational researchers, and disciplinary experts. The development process is described, with attention to previously established criteria for quality in qualitative research. On the basis of stakeholder input and the development process, recommendations are offered for the use of the resulting Chemical Substance Identification (CSI) Survey in classrooms, and the instrument and sample responses are provided.