Isabella Jackson, & Dr. Ariel Vaughn
Many students find General Chemistry to be very difficult because it is a fast paced and algebra intensive course. This causes many students in General Chemistry to receive D’s, F’s, or withdraw (W’s) from the course. This leads to students, especially students from historically underrepresented groups, not seeing themselves as scientists. Homework assignments are one tool to alleviate this problem that students face and may change students’ perceptions of chemistry. In this study, each week students at the Keck Science Department at Scripps, Claremont McKenna, and Pitzer Colleges were asked the simple question, “How have you observed chemistry outside of the classroom this week?”. Responses to the question were analyzed for the use of scientific language. The responses were coded into categories including: No Scientific Language, Some Scientific Language, and Clearly Scientific Language. Responses categorized as No Scientific Language were when no scientific terms were used. Responses labeled Clearly Scientific Language contain either three or more scientific terms or forty percent of the sentence consists of scientific terms. Some Scientific Language is any response between Clearly and No Scientific Language. Qualitative analysis is currently underway in NVivo 14. We anticipate that students will use more scientific language as they become more comfortable with scientific terms, resulting in a trend as the semester progresses. As students use scientific language more comfortably, students will feel more confident communicating in scientific spaces. This new level of comfort will hopefully empower students to see themselves as scientists.