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Adequately accommodating students who are blind or low-vision (BLV) in the sciences has been a focus of recent inquiry, but much of the research to date has addressed broad accommodations rather than devising and testing specific teaching strategies that respond to the unique challenges of BLV students learning chemistry. This case study seeks to identify instructional techniques that support or impede the representation of information for BLV students in the context of a typical gas laws unit in a college chemistry course for science majors. Desimone's framework on selection and attention informed the analysis. A blind student participated in five interviews to provide insights on how symbols, equations, and concepts were communicated and interpreted. Findings identified in the analysis of transcripts pertain to three communication modalities of interest: verbal, written, and tactile representations of information to aid learning. Using the results generated for practitioners, the authors generated guidelines for faculty, teaching assistants, and university administrators to improve the teaching and learning chemistry for BLV students.

Conducting qualitative research in any discipline warrants two actions: accessing participants and eliciting their ideas. In chemistry education research, survey techniques have been used to increase access to participants and diversify samples. Interview tasks (such as card sorting, using demonstrations, and using simulations) have been used to elicit participant ideas. While surveys can increase participation and remove geographic barriers from studies, they typically lack the ability to obtain detailed, thick description of participant ideas, which are possible from in-person interviews. Minimal research in CER has examined how to harness technology to synthesize traditionally diverse research approaches to advance the field. This paper presents a novel method for interviewing research participants employing freely available technology to investigate student ideas about the purposes of conducting chemistry outreach, how success of an outreach event is evaluated, and student understanding of the chemistry content embedded in activities facilitated at events. As the outreach practitioner population comes from numerous institutions and is therefore geographically diverse, technology is necessary in order to gain access to these students. To elicit their ideas and remove barriers associated with rapport, interview tasks are adapted and implemented electronically. The description of a novel set of methods is coupled with evidence from the interviews to illustrate the trustworthiness of the data obtained and to support the method as a means to improve qualitative data collection in chemistry education research. These methods create a unique data collection environment for off-site investigations and are applicable to all disciplines, as they shed light on how qualitative research in the 21st century can increase the diversity of samples and improve the transferability of findings.

Research has shown that students in traditional college-preparatory chemistry courses become masters of mathematical equations without an understanding of the conceptual basis for the mathematical relationships. This problem is rooted not only in what curriculum is presented to students, but also in how it is experienced by the students. Ample evidence exists in support of both inquiry-based instruction and the use of particulate-level models in instruction as a means for improving students' conceptual understandings in chemistry. Little evidence exists, though, for the effectiveness of an instructional model that involves the merger of these two methods. In an effort to address this gap, a series of laboratory and classroom activities was created that blended guided inquiry-based instructional practices with particulate-level modeling experiences. The content of the curriculum focused exclusively on phases of matter and chemical versus physical changes in matter. This research explores the novel curriculum's effect on student understanding of the particulate nature of matter in two sections of high school chemistry. Qualitative and quantitative evidence supporting the curriculum is presented.

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Informal chemistry education/chemistry outreach is ubiquitous with the chemical enterprise. However, little research has focused on the planning, implementation, or evaluation of these events. Results from a previous study suggest that college students involved with collegiate chapters of the American Chemical Society and Alpha Chi Sigma are heavily involved with chemistry outreach, and their most frequently discussed purpose is to teach chemistry content to their audiences. Given this goal, it is timely to investigate how well these college students, who are acting as teachers in outreach environments, understand the chemistry content embedded in the activities they implement during their events. Presented in this paper are the results of a content analysis of semi-structured interviews (N = 37) focused specifically on student understanding of the elephant toothpaste reaction and making liquid nitrogen ice cream at a general chemistry level. Results show prevalent misunderstandings and misconceptions of the content despite the sample being composed primarily of junior and senior chemistry majors. Implications for teaching in both formal and informal environments are presented in light of these findings, as well as potential future investigations of the teaching and learning occurring during chemistry outreach.

Students’ inaccurate ideas about what is represented by chemical equations and concepts underlying stoichiometry are well documented; however, there are few classroom-ready instructional solutions to help students build scientifically accurate ideas about these topics central to learning chemistry. An intervention (two inquiry-based activities) was developed, piloted, and evaluated with common misconceptions in mind. The intervention was carried out in five sections of a high school chemistry class at a technical career campus, and pre/posttest data using a published instrument were collected to evaluate the intervention’s effectiveness in building accurate stoichiometric concepts. Statistically significant growth with a large effect size occurred from pre to posttest demonstrating that the intervention improved conceptual understanding even though there were variations in the intervention delivery, as well as small differences detected between 11th and 12th grade student performance. The study, an action research project carried out by a teacher enrolled in a long-term professional development program, has implications for the value of rigorous materials design and evaluation framed by the chemistry education research literature. Study replication in other classroom contexts would be useful in further validating the learning outcomes of the activities. For practitioners, the activities studied here are free and available online for classroom use.