MCKEESPORT, Pa. — Penn State Greater Allegheny has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Undergraduate Education grant to understand and improve reasoning in chemistry and physics. Beth Lindsey, associate professor of physics, and Megan Nagel, interim chancellor and chief academic officer and associate professor of chemistry, will share the $2 million five-year award with faculty colleagues from University of Maine, North Dakota State University and University of North Florida.
The project, “Developing, Testing, and Disseminating Reasoning Chain Construction Tools for Use in Physics and Chemistry” seeks to develop tools and instructor guides to be used in college level physics and chemistry courses. The team's hope for this research project is to help instructors gain insights into their students’ thinking, and to recognize that some errors may be rooted in students’ reasoning abilities rather than their content understanding, allowing instructors to target their instruction more efficiently.
“We are designing tools to help students learn how to build an explanation for a scientific phenomenon. The goal is to improve student reasoning and their ability to communicate about that reasoning,” said Lindsey. “One of the most important outcomes of introductory college-level courses in physics and chemistry are the reasoning skills that students develop in those courses, more so even than the content knowledge they learn. Most students in introductory college physics or chemistry don’t go on to take upper-level courses in those areas. Instead, they put their reasoning skills to work in other areas.”