Ryan Stowe

EDUCATION

• B.A. 2010, Albion College
• Ph.D. 2016, The Scripps Research Institute
• Postdoctoral fellow at Michigan State University, 2016-2019

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RESEARCH DESCRIPTION

Overview

The RELIC Lab explores how chemistry classes can support learning that is useful in students’ personal and professional lives. Specifically, we consider the reasonableness of proxies for daily life utility and investigate how various approaches to chemistry teaching move students toward these proxies. Assumptions grounding this work have changed since the group began. At the start, we assumed that knowledge of chemistry content was useful in daily life if that knowledge was organized around fundamental disciplinary ideas and could be used to explain and model phenomena. However, evidence from our research, as well as scholarship from science & technology studies, demonstrated this assumption to be invalid. We therefore shifted from focusing on content understandings toward attending to the tacit views on knowledge and knowing that underlie how, why, and what students learn. We now assume that, for a class to prepare students to use science in daily life, the students must experience parallels between the nature and purpose of class activities and the nature and purpose of activities undertaken beyond school. Grounded in these evolving assumptions, our research explores chemistry teaching and learning in three related, but distinct strands of work:

Strand 1: Characterizing Courses That Support Expert-like Explanations and Models 

This strand of our work explores the characteristics of chemistry courses that support students in using chemistry core ideas (e.g., bonding, energy) to explain and model phenomena. This work allows our group to move beyond vague claims such as “intervention X improves learning” toward considering what features of a course relate to specific outcomes aligned with our goals.

To better support nuanced and actionable claims about how changes in course design might improve chemistry learning, our group uses an analytic model of large-enrollment chemistry courses to contextualize differences in outcomes of interest. Specifically, we characterized the intellectual work emphasized and rewarded on exams (i.e., assessment emphasis), what is taught in whole-class meetings (i.e., instructional emphasis), and how those meetings are enacted (instructional practices) across several courses. We then used these nuanced descriptions to help us make sense of why students in some courses were better supported in explaining and modeling chemical phenomena than their peers.

Strand 2: Understanding Epistemological Messaging in College Science Courses

The second strand of research in our group is grounded in the research-supported premise that students may experience what they learn in class as useful in daily life if they (tacitly) see similarities between knowing and learning in-class and in-life. Thus, moving toward useful chemistry learning entails understanding how and why students construct knowledge in our courses and working to align ways of constructing and justifying knowledge useful in class with ways that are useful in-life. To advance this goal, our group investigates how the structure and enactment of our courses communicate what and whose knowledge has value. We then consider how (or whether) tacit views on knowledge and knowing (i.e., epistemologies), useful in-class, might have utility in the world beyond the classroom.

Building on work describing epistemological messages embedded in student-teacher discourse, our research sketches epistemological messaging landscapes in which students might experience, negotiate, and respond to messages from a variety of sources (e.g., assessments, instruction, curricular materials). In doing so, we explore how (or whether) a variety of messages from several sources synthesize over the course of a semester to affect students’ understandings of knowing and learning. Additionally, we consider how (or whether) instructors’ views on useful ways to construct and justify knowledge show up in the design and enactment of their courses.

Strand 3: Opening Space for Useful Chemistry Learning

The third strand of research in our group opens space for re-imagining college chemistry by addressing two related questions: 1) What course-embedded mechanisms act to “weed out” students of color? and 2) how were chemistry courses fashioned into ways of sorting who is worthy to be a STEM professional and who is not?

Our studies exploring the process of “weeding out” in college chemistry found that over-emphasis on rote calculations marginalizes students on the basis of their access to pre-college math preparation. More students who are sometimes categorized as “at risk” would be expected to succeed in our courses if we emphasized constructing causal mechanisms instead of “plugging and chugging”. This work suggests concrete changes instructors can make to lessen the negative impacts of their course and calls for a broader interrogation of who our instructional norms benefit and harm.

To address our second question, we are mapping how general chemistry was fashioned into a nested set of sorting mechanisms that limit possible futures for tens of thousands of students taking chemistry per year. Specifically, using methods drawn from science studies, we are mapping shifts and continuities in the premises and practices undergirding general chemistry. Two sets of epistemic premises are of especial interest to us: (1) assumptions about chemistry knowledge (and how it should be known); and (2) assumptions about chemistry learners (and how their qualities can be known).