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      Faculty beliefs about the purposes for teaching undergraduate physical chemistry courses

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          Abstract

          We report the results of a phenomenographic analysis of faculty beliefs about the purposes for teaching upper-division physical chemistry courses in the undergraduate curriculum. A purposeful sampling strategy was used to recruit a diverse group of faculty for interviews. Collectively, the participating faculty regularly teach or have taught physical chemistry courses in 16 different chemistry departments in the United States. While faculty agreed that the goal of teaching physical chemistry was to help students develop robust conceptual knowledge of the subject matter within thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, spectroscopy, chemical kinetics, and other major topics, some articulated strong beliefs about epistemic and social learning goals. An understanding of the relations between different ways of thinking about teaching upper-division physical chemistry courses offers practitioners with alternative perspectives that may help them expand their awareness of the purposes for teaching physical chemistry in the undergraduate curriculum. Furthermore, knowledge of faculty beliefs about their teaching provides educational researchers and curriculum developers with an understanding about the potential opportunities or barriers for helping faculty align their beliefs and goals for teaching with research-based instructional strategies. We discuss our findings with the intention to expand faculty awareness of the discourse on physical chemistry education to include various perspectives of the purpose for teaching upper-division physical chemistry courses.

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          Most cited references28

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          Categorization and Representation of Physics Problems by Experts and Novices*

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            Rigor in qualitative research: the assessment of trustworthiness.

            L Krefting (1991)
            Despite a growing interest in qualitative research in occupational therapy, little attention has been placed on establishing its rigor. This article presents one model that can be used for the assessment of trustworthiness or merit of qualitative inquiry. Guba's (1981) model describes four general criteria for evaluation of research and then defines each from both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective. Several strategies for the achievement of rigor in qualitative research useful for both researchers and consumers of research are described.
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              Expert and novice performance in solving physics problems.

              Although a sizable body of knowledge is prerequisite to expert skill, that knowledge must be indexed by large numbers of patterns that, on recognition, guide the expert in a fraction of a second to relevant parts of the knowledge store. The knowledge forms complex schemata that can guide a problem's interpretation and solution and that constitute a large part of what we call physical intuition.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                CERPCE
                Chemistry Education Research and Practice
                Chem. Educ. Res. Pract.
                Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)
                1109-4028
                1756-1108
                2016
                2016
                : 17
                : 1
                : 80-99
                Article
                10.1039/C5RP00148J
                95bb321c-ea14-4d34-8886-1023ab7a7fc5
                © 2016
                History

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