A Graduate-Course-Based Chemistry Education Research Experience: Describing a General Model and the Project Outcomes Related to Investigating Chemistry Graduate Students’ Perceptions of the Imposter Phenomenon

Abstract

With the movement toward engaging students in authentic science practices, course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) are becoming more common across fields such as chemistry; however, one of the challenges with CUREs is they are necessarily context-specific, operating under the constraints of a faculty’s research interests and the laboratory equipment available in a department. This limitation prevents the development of a general model for a CURE that could be taken and adapted by researchers across universities. As an alternative to benchtop research, discipline-based education research (DBER) provides the flexibility to make significant modifications to the scope of a project investigated without impacting the resources needed to conduct the study. To this end, this article provides an overview of a course-based chemistry education research experience that involved graduate students learning about and then applying qualitative research methods. Although contextualized using graduate students, chemistry education research, and qualitative research methods, we emphasize the general nature of this course, which provides a model that could be readily adapted to other contexts or education levels (e.g., a “DBER CURE”). As a proof-of-concept, project outcomes related to the study designed by the graduate students in the course (the first four authors) are presented, highlighting the methodological decisions made and how the course informed the investigation of chemistry graduate students’ perceptions related to the imposter phenomenon.