by Katherine Lazenby
The University of Iowa

As an awardee of the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), I want to share my experience preparing for submission (and deciding to apply in the first place) to the program. I found applying to the program to be a valuable experience, and receiving the award has afforded me many opportunities, such as agency over my research directions and the ability to travel and share my work at conferences. I hope my perspectives will help future graduate students write compelling and competitive proposals!

For those who are unfamiliar with GRFP, it’s a program intended to fund researchers early in their career (senior undergraduates who are grad school-bound, and first- and second-year graduate students). Currently (2019), GRFP provides three years of funding, including a $34,000 annual stipend and $12,000 for academic costs like tuition, fees, and travel. (For more info on GRFP, see https://www.nsfgrfp.org/general_resources/about) 

The mantra of the program is that they “fund people not projects,” and the stated goal of the program is to support students who demonstrate the potential to be “life-long leaders that contribute significantly to both scientific innovation and teaching.” Ooof, that’s kind of a lot of pressure for a first or second-year graduate student. 

When a faculty member at my university encouraged me to attend a GRFP workshop, I knew nothing about the program but wiggled around my teaching obligations to attend anyway. I left the workshop a bit deflated, having interpreted this “life-long leaders in science innovation” description of the program to mean that there exists a subset of people who are high-achieving, brilliant, full of potential, *sparkly* and fundable. The workshop had been attended by students with several years of previous research experience at large research-intensive universities and prestigious internships who asked all the right questions and seemed to have been groomed for the program. I felt that surely I, with all of a semester of undergraduate research experience at a small liberal arts institution, wasn’t the type of person that would be successful in applying to GRFP; I wasn’t like them. 

But it is this idea – the idea that there’s a type of person that is likely to be awarded GRFP – that I want to challenge. 

The process of writing and revising my application materials into what was ultimately a funded application included feedback from an army of people; I worked with the graduate college at my university, my advisor, CER graduate students and postdocs, previous winners in other departments, our department research and writing support person, and graduate students who had applied unsuccessfully, and little pieces from all of those people ended up in my application. The role of feedback from other people was not to help me figure out which story to tell – I knew my story – but rather help me present my story in the best way, to frame my experiences in a way that was *sparkly*. 

It is not easy to write about yourself in this way; as a person who identifies as a Midwesterner (maybe you knew this from the Ooof above) and a female, I had been socialized to communicate about my experiences humbly, to make them small instead of notable, unpretentious instead of worthy of the “life-long leaders in scientific innovation and teaching” description. The tendency for people from certain groups to conform to what is known as “modesty norm” (see for example, Smith & Huntoon, 2013) made this kind of self-promotive writing particularly uncomfortable, but I believe that the challenge of learning to convey my story as extraordinary (in two pages or less) is one that I believe will support me far beyond my GRFP application.

Six months before submission, I wrote what I now refer to as “the roughest draft” with the intention of getting feedback from others in my department. Not much of the roughest draft made it into the submitted materials, but receiving feedback on the roughest draft spring boarded the process of reframing my story. To illustrate, the following passages come from the roughest draft and the final draft, respectively. They tell the same story – that my undergraduate research didn’t go as planned, but I perceive it as an experience that ultimately lead me to pursue CER as a graduate student.

An excerpt from “the roughest draft” of my Personal Statement regarding my undergraduate research experience:

“…involvement waned until I was forced to step in as a CSI mentor to maintain the program at all, virtually abandoning my role as a researcher. And despite dazzlingly underwhelming (and mostly non-existent) results, Dr. X remained supportive and ever determined to instill in me the tenacity and persistence it takes to produce valuable research. From my undergraduate research experience, I did not publish a paper in any journal...”

An excerpt from the final draft:

“I initially set out to characterize the undergraduate mentors' experience through passive observation and pre- and post-experience interviews; however, faced with waning volunteer mentor involvement, I embraced a new role as the lead CSI student mentor, and the research became an immersive, ethnographic experience. Despite changes to the original research plan, my program succeeded in its first aim, to provide an opportunity for schoolchildren to participate in science, and it has continued since my graduation, involving nearly 80 children annually. Additionally, I, too, was engaging in the sorts of realistic activities that science education researchers often do. I had learned to plan investigations of teaching and learning, to ask the appropriate sorts of questions for this field, to collect and analyze qualitative data. I had acquired a realistic understanding of the challenges involved in research, the ability to think independently, and perhaps most importantly, a desire to pursue research in chemistry education and a lasting commitment to educational science outreach.”

When my feedback group finished reading the roughest draft, the feedback was generally that someone who describes their work as ‘dazzlingly underwhelming’ and unpublishable is not the type of person who will be awarded GRFP. And they were right – kind of. 

While I initially took their feedback to mean that I was inherently not the type of person who could write a successful application, upon reflection, I don’t think such a thing exists. Between the roughest draft and the submitted draft, I reframed my failing research as a willingness to adapt and take on leadership roles, my non-publishable work as a self-sustaining outreach program, and I claimed for myself an ability to think independently instead of framing any benefits I received as a product of my research advisor’s determination. 

I don’t believe that, based on my experience, I can offer the definitively best way to prepare GRFP application materials. However, some of my experiences in preparing to apply for GRFP stand out as major contributors to my success:

• Be willing to promote yourself, and recognize that self-promotive writing is both a difficult and valuable skill

• Find a “feedback army” from many different backgrounds

• Use bolding and italicizing to draw readers’ attention

• Allow plenty of time for revisions; start early

There is no type of person who wins GRFP; GRFP winners are those who can convey that a “dazzlingly underwhelming” experience can also be a learning experience and critical point in the research journeys of young scientists with the potential to change the world.

by Debbie Herrington (Grand Valley State University) and Ryan Sweeder (Lyman Briggs College, Michigan State University)

As undergraduate students majoring in chemistry, one of us in the US and the other in Canada, we were familiar with the Journal of Chemical Education, but had never heard of Chemistry Education Research (CER). Had either of us known it was possible to do graduate work in CER, we may have made some different graduate school choices. Maybe you are in a similar situation; just hearing about this thing called CER. Or maybe you are about to begin graduate work in CER but wanting to know more about the field in general. In this post we aim to provide a concise summary of the development and current state of the CER field as well as what we view as the future challenges and opportunities for the field. Having individually come to CER through notably different pathways, we hope our perspective gives you a sense of CER as a discipline and encourages you to jump in and participate in the work and important conversations needed to build the CER community and move it forward. 

Where we came from

A strong interest in improving the teaching and learning of chemistry has been a focus in the US for almost a century with the establishment of the Division of Chemical Education (1921), the Journal of Chemical Education (1923), and the ACS Exams Institute (1930). Yet the field of Chemistry Education Research (CER), did not start to truly emerge until much more recently. Prior to the 1960s, there were few systematic studies of the teaching and learning of chemistry. A great, recent review of CER by Cooper and Stowe (2018) in Chemical Reviews describes the development of CER from the early stages, where effective chemistry teaching was identified using instructor instinct and experience (personal empiricism), to the systematic studies of teaching and learning based on learning theories and supported by evidence that help define the field today. Early chemistry education researchers primarily were full professors looking to improve the teaching and learning of chemistry by applying evidence-based approaches analogous to those used in traditional chemistry research. Without formal training in CER, these early researchers drew upon the theories and methods from fields such as education, cognitive science, social psychology, and the other early practitioners in what would become the discipline-based education research (DBER) fields. This established CER as a truly cross-disciplinary field, exploring the unique aspects of the teaching and learning of chemistry. The DBER report, published by the National Academy of Sciences in 2012, highlights the important contributions of other fields to CER as well as describes the relationship between DBER and research areas such as the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), cognitive science, educational psychology and education evaluation. Although there are areas of considerable overlap, what primarily distinguishes CER from these other disciplines is the specific focus on the nature and depth of the chemistry content. 

The development of the CER field has generated many important insights into and implications for the teaching and learning of chemistry. For example, Johnstone’s famous triangle has helped to articulate a core challenge to novice learners of chemistry and has resulted in instructional practices that explicitly address the connection between macroscopic properties, particle behavior, and symbolic representations. Further, the push to try to assess and identify the accuracy and depth of students’ understanding of a range of chemistry topics led to the development of concept inventories and a focus on conceptual questions rather than straight algorithmic questions. More recently, researchers have investigated how to most effectively use technology to help students develop a deep conceptual understanding and visualize phenomena and processes that can not directly be observed.

 Where are we now?

The field of CER has become a generally recognized sub-discipline of chemistry with dedicated conferences and peer-reviewed journals. In the United States and many other countries, CER symposia are regularly scheduled at national meetings and CER faculty are employed in university chemistry departments. It also is recognized within the chemistry community by its inclusion in broad disciplinary journal such as the Canadian Journal of Chemistry. Further, from the awarding of the first CER Ph.D. in the US in 1993, there are now over 25 CER Ph.D. programs across the US as well as programs in many other countries around the world. Moreover, within the last decade CER post-doctoral opportunities have become much more prevalent, bringing CER inline with other chemistry sub-disciplines. 

The major research questions that are now being asked in the CER field have also changed. Researchers are moving beyond what students know to focus on factors that impact the learning process. These include affective, situational, or environmental factors as well as exploring the benefits and limitations of different pedagogical approaches for the diversity of students and populations. With these new research foci have come new methods; A 2014 ACS Symposium Series publication, Tools of Chemistry Education Research (edited by Cole and Bunce) describes in detail the use of several quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis methods. Where early quantitative analysis generally involved descriptive and simpler inferential statistics (e.g., t-test and ANOVA), the use of more sophisticated statistical models and methods has supported the investigation of a wider range of questions. Similarly, although the theory of constructivism still underlies much qualitative researcher in CER, researchers are also now using a variety of other theoretical perspectives to investigate this more diverse range of research questions. A 2007 publication, Theoretical Frameworks for Research in Chemistry/Science Education (edited by Orgill and Bodner) highlights several of these. 

 Where can we go?

As the field of CER has grown, the knowledge it has generated has started to influence how chemistry is taught. We can see this in the incorporation of particulate level diagrams in textbooks, the development of ACS conceptual exams, high quality visualizations such as the VisChem animations and PhET simulations, and the increased focus on the use of active learning strategies. Yet visiting a few college general chemistry classes will readily demonstrate that this impact is still limited. As the DBER Report concluded, “DBER and related research have not yet prompted widespread changes in teaching practice among science and engineering faculty. Different strategies are needed to more effectively translate findings from DBER into practice.” This reminds us that a major underlying goal for the CER community, improving the teaching and learning of chemistry, is still awaiting significant progress. In addition to identifying effective pedagogies and curricula, we must conduct studies to ensure that these methods work in a wide variety of settings and for an increasingly diverse student population. Further, as this broad goal cannot be accomplished by “preaching to the choir,” we must better understand how and why individuals decide to change how they teach and identify ways to effectively disseminate and communicate the key findings of chemistry education research outside of the CER community. 

Simultaneously, a second challenge exists for the CER community; how do we better incorporate individuals into the community of practice? CER has a history of being an inclusive community supporting its members through mentoring. Indeed, if we want to broaden the impact of our research, we need to be inclusive and supportive of those outside the CER community in using the findings of our work. However, we must also be careful to maintain the integrity and standards of quality research and research methods. Initially, when the field of CER was young there were many challenges facing faculty in gaining support and acceptance for their work in CER. At the same time, given the smaller literature base, fewer standard of practice, and a relatively wide-open field of possible questions to investigate, the barriers for researchers to enter into CER was lower. These early CER researchers helped to develop the methods and practices that have become the norms in the discipline over the last 60 years. As the methodologies in CER have become more sophisticated it has rightly become more difficult to transition from traditional chemistry research into CER. Assuming that anyone with a Ph.D. in chemistry can simply step from bench research into the field of CER by reading a few articles, devalues the efforts to develop the CER field as well as the years spent by many during their CER Ph.D. and post-doctoral experiences learning and practicing the methods of the discipline. At the same time, it is important to find ways to meaningfully engage these individuals in the community, to more readily allow studies to be multi-institutional and include a more diverse set of participants, which will ensure that outcomes are relevant to the broader teaching and learning of chemistry. One potential mechanism for an existing faculty member wanting to make the transition to CER could be a CER sabbatical which engages them in the norms and practices of the discipline.

Having come this far, it is clear that the CER field still has challenges. Moving forward, if our goal is to broadly improve the teaching and learning of chemistry, the community must address a variety of questions. What are the major findings of CER that are most critical for us as a community to disseminate and where and how do we effectively disseminate these? What are the most important questions regarding the teaching and learning of chemistry that the CER community should focus on? How do we, as a community, clearly articulate the standards and norms of our discipline so that people are not constantly trying to reinvent the wheel or exploring unfruitful research agendas? An upcoming opportunity to start tackling some of these questions is the 2020 BCCE Symposium “Supporting the growth and impact of the chemistry education research community”. We hope you will be there to join us and provide your input on some of these important questions.