Constructivism and personal epistemology development in undergraduate chemistry students

Cooperative learning in organic chemistry increases student assessment of learning gains in key transferable skills

“…In fact, numerous students expressed hostility towards the cooperative learning classroom structure in their written comments, and these students appeared to believe that they could only learn by lecture. This could possibly be because the students are at an early stage in their college career, but it might also possibly arise from these individual students having a personal epistemology with an authority-based justification of knowledge (Barger et al, 2015(Barger et al, , 2017. Such comments corroborate the numerical differences in perceptions of course quality, quality of instruction, instructor enthusiasm, and instructor accessibility.…”

“…In addition, our student population is from a highly selective university in terms of undergraduate admissions standards, similar to that reported by Bradley and coworkers (Bradley et al, 2002), who also did not see significant effects of classroom format on test scores. The interplay between students' personal epistemologies and classroom formats may also have played a role, since students with authority-based justifications of knowledge tend to prefer and perform well in lecture format classes (Barger et al, 2015(Barger et al, , 2017. Finally, the difference in format may have had a differential impact on a segment of our student population which was not revealed by our analysis.…”

“…Cooperative learning classes (experimental group) relied heavily on students working through concepts and application problems in class through small, cooperative peer teams (4-6 students per group) while the instructor and TAs circulated between the groups. As previously described (Barger et al, 2017), during the active learning sessions, students worked in small groups on activities drawn from the Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) (Moog and Spencer, 2008;Moog et al, 2009), Student Centered Activities for Large Enrollment Undergraduate Programs (SCALE UP) (Oliver-Hoyo and Beichner, 2004;Oliver-Hoyo, 2011), and problem manipulation (Siburt et al, 2011) traditions while the professor and teaching assistants circulated to engage in the discussions. Teams were initially assigned randomly using decks of cards -a process that was transparent to the students.…”

“…Most of the in-class activity worksheets for the cooperative learning class were drawn from material published at that time (Straumanis, 2009) or unpublished at the time (Ruder, 2015), but used with the permission of the author in a beta-test environment. Some of the more advanced application activity worksheets were composed by the instructor (see Barger et al, 2017 for an example).…”

“…Both formats were taught by the same instructor. Assessments of these student populations were conducted in three areas: psychological affect as a function of time (previously published) (Barger et al, 2015(Barger et al, , 2017, formal summative assessments via assigned work and exams worth points in the course, and students' self-reports of learning gains. For the latter purpose, which is the focus of this contribution, a Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) survey instrument Jordan, 2012;Vishnumolakala et al, 2016) was developed and employed for comparison of the outcomes for students in the two types of classroom environments.…”