Title: A Journey Toward Asset-Focused Chemistry Education
Abstract:
Chemistry education research has often emphasized identifying misconceptions, gaps, or deficiencies in student understanding. While such approaches have revealed important patterns, they often locate difficulty primarily in learners and give less attention to how chemistry knowledge is framed, how instruction is designed and enacted, and how institutional structures shape learning opportunities. My research program responds to this limitation by developing toward an asset-focused approach that examines how students’ and instructors’ existing ideas function across the epistemic practices of chemistry and the instructional and institutional systems that organize learning.
This work brings together three interrelated lines of inquiry: studies that reframe student reasoning about chemical concepts as productive cognitive resources; investigations of classroom practices, instructional design, and instructor thinking as interdependent influences on learning; and analyses of programmatic and institutional structures that communicate values about what counts as participation and success in chemistry.
A central illustration of this approach comes from a sustained body of work on molecular symmetry. Because symmetry relies heavily on spatial representations and explicit rules and conventions, instructional tools often encode strong assumptions about what counts as legitimate spatial reasoning and how students should engage with it. Drawing on empirical studies, I show that students’ ideas about symmetry are diverse and context dependent, and that many forms of reasoning can be productive for symmetry-based tasks, even when they diverge from commonly privileged spatial strategies. Extending this analysis highlights how instructional responses are shaped by instructor thinking and curricular expectations, underscoring the need for tools that help instructors interpret and respond to student reasoning in asset-focused ways.
Bio:
Sam Pazicni is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He earned BA degrees in Chemistry and Music from Washington & Jefferson College, and MS and PhD degrees in Inorganic Chemistry from UW–Madison. He completed postdoctoral research in Biophysics and Chemistry Education at the University of Michigan before beginning his independent academic career at the University of New Hampshire. After a decade at UNH, he returned in 2019 to UW–Madison, where his research program examines student reasoning, instructional design, and how training program structures communicate values in chemistry. Sam is the 2021 recipient of a Distinguished Faculty Postdoctoral Mentoring Award, the 2025 recipient of an Exceptional Service Support Program Award, and the 2026 recipient of the Class of 1955 Teaching Excellence Award. He serves as General Chair of the 2026 Biennial Conference on Chemical Education, as an associate editor for Chemistry Teacher International, and as chair of the Bridge to the Chemistry Doctorate Program at UW–Madison. Outside the classroom, he enjoys music, theatre, traveling, and cooking extravagant things.