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Chemistry Education Research and Practice

The free to access journal for teachers, researchers and other practitioners in chemistry education

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Time to first decision (all decisions): 25.0 days**

Time to first decision (peer reviewed only): 40.0 days***

Editor: Scott Lewis

Chair: David F Treagust

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Chemistry Education Research and Practice (CERP) is the journal for teachers, researchers and other practitioners at all levels of chemistry education. It is published free of charge electronically four times a year, thanks to sponsorship by the Royal Society of Chemistry's Education Division. Coverage includes the following:

• Research, and reviews of research, in chemistry education
• Evaluations of effective innovative practice in the teaching of chemistry
• In-depth analyses of issues of direct relevance to chemistry education

The objectives of the journal:

• To provide researchers with the means to publish their work in full in a journal exclusively dedicated to chemistry education
• To offer teachers of chemistry at all levels a place where they can share effective ideas and methods for the teaching and learning of chemistry
• To bridge the gap between the two groups so that researchers will have their results seen by those who could benefit from using them, and practitioners will gain from encountering the ideas and results of those who have made a particular study of the learning process

Guidance on the nature of acceptable contributions can be found in Recognising quality in reports of chemistry education research and practice .

Meet the team

Find out who is on the editorial and advisory boards for the  Chemistry Education Research and Practice (CERP) journal.

David F Treagust ,  Curtin University of Technology, Australia

Scott  Lewis ,  University of South Florida, USA

Deputy editor

Nicole Graulich , Justus-Liebig Universität Gießen, Germany

Associate editors

Jack Barbera , Portland State University, USA

Mageswary Karpudewan , Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM)

James Nyachwaya , North Dakota State University, USA

Editorial board members

Mei-Hung Chiu , National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan

Resa Kelly , San Jose State University, USA

Gwen Lawrie , University of Queensland, Australia

David Read , University of Southampton, UK

Bill Byers , University of Ulster, UK

Melanie Cooper , Michigan State University, USA

Onno de Jong, University of Utrecht, Netherlands Iztok Devetak , University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Odilla Finlayson , Dublin City University, Ireland

Loretta Jones , University of Northern Colorado, USA

Orla Catherine Kelly , Church of Ireland College of Education, Ireland

Scott Lewis, Editor, University of South Florida, USA

Iwona Maciejowska, Jagiellonian University, Poland Rachel Mamlok-Naaman , The Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel

David McGarvey, Keele University, UK Mansoor Niaz , Universidad de Oriente, Venezuela MaryKay Orgill , University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA George Papageorgiou , Democritus University of Thrace, Greece Ilka Parchmann , University of Kiel, Germany Michael K. Seery , University of Edinburgh, UK

Keith Taber , University of Cambridge, UK Daniel Tan , Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Zoltán Toth , University of Debrecen, Hungary

Georgios Tsaparlis , (Founding Editor), University of Ioannina, Greece

Jan H van Driel , The University of Melbourne, Australia

Mihye Won , Monash University, Australia

Lisa Clatworthy , Managing Editor

Helen Saxton , Editorial Production Manager

Becky Webb , Senior Publishing Editor

Laura Cooper , Publishing Editor

Hannah Dunckley , Publishing Editor

Natalie Ford , Publishing Assistant

Journal specific guidelines

The intended emphasis is on the process of learning, not on the content. Contributions describing alternative ways of presenting chemical information to students (including the description of new demonstrations or laboratory experiments or computer simulations or animations) are unlikely to be considered for publication. All contributions should be written in clear and concise English. Technical language should be kept to the absolute minimum required by accuracy. Authors are urged to pay particular attention to the way references are cited both in the text and in the bibliography.

The journal has three objectives.

First  to provide researchers a means to publish high quality, fully peer reviewed, educational research reports in the special domain of chemistry education. The studies reported should have all features of scholarship in chemistry education, that is they must be:

• original and previously unpublished
• theory based
• supported by empirical data
• of generalisable character.

The last requirement means that the studies should have an interest for and an impact on the global practice of chemistry, and not be simply of a regional character. Contributions must include a review of the research literature relevant to the topic, and state clearly the way(s) the study contributes to our knowledge base. Last but not least, they should conclude with implications for other research and/or the practice of chemistry teaching.

Second   to offer practitioners (teachers of chemistry at all levels) a place where they can share effective ideas and methods for the teaching and learning of chemistry and issues related to these, including assessment.

The emphasis is on effectiveness, the demonstration that the approach described is successful, possibly more so than the alternatives. Contributions are particularly welcome if the subject matter can be applied widely and is concerned with encouraging active, independent or cooperative learning.

Of special interest are methods that increase student motivation for learning, and those that help them to become effective exploiters of their chemical knowledge and understanding. It is highly desirable that such contributions should be demonstrably based, wherever possible, on established educational theory and results.

Third  to help to bridge the gap between educational researchers and practitioners by providing a single platform where both groups can publish high-quality papers with the realistic hope that researchers will find their results seen by those who could benefit from using them.

Also, practitioners will gain from encountering the ideas and results of those who have made a particular study of the learning process in finding better ways to improve their teaching and the learning experience of their students.  

Articles should be submitted using ScholarOne , the Royal Society of Chemistry's article review and submission system. A printed copy of the manuscript will not be required. Your submission will be acknowledged as soon as possible. 

Exceptions to normal Royal Society of Chemistry policy

Submissions to Chemistry Education Research and Practice do not require a table of contents entry. Submissions to the journal should use Harvard referencing.

Citations in the text should therefore be made by use of the surname of the author(s) and the year of the publication, at the appropriate place. Note that with one or two authors the name(s) are given, while if the source has three or more authors, it is cited with the first named author as 'Author et al. '

When more than one source is cited in the text, they should be listed in chronological and then alphabetical order for example, '(Jones, 2001; Smith, 2001; Adams, 2006)'. The references themselves are given at the end of the final printed text, in alphabetical and, if the same author is cited more than once, chronological order. An example of a journal article reference as it would be presented is Taber K. S., (2015), Advancing chemistry education as a field, Chem. Educ. Res. Pract. , 16 (1), 6–8.

Article types

Chemistry Education Research and Practice  publishes:

Perspectives

Review articles.

Perspectives are short readable articles covering current areas of interest. They may take the form of personal accounts of research or a critical analysis of activity in a specialist area. By their nature, they will not be comprehensive reviews of a field of chemistry. Since the readership of Chemistry Education Research and Practice is wide-ranging, the article should be easily comprehensible to a non-specialist in the field, whilst at the same time providing an authoritative discussion of the area concerned.

We welcome submissions of Perspective articles that:

• Communicate new challenges or visions for teaching chemistry framed in current chemistry education research or theories with evidence to support claims.
• Propose frameworks (theoretical, conceptual, curricular), models, pedagogies or practices informed by personal expertise and supported by research outcomes (either the author’s own research or the wider body of education research).
• Argue theoretical stances accompanied by recommendations for how these can be applied in teaching practice or measured in student conceptualisation of knowledge, with examples.

For more information on Perspective articles please see our 2022 Editorial (DOI: 10.1039/D2RP90006H )

These are normally invited by the Editorial Board and editorial office, although suggestions from readers for topics and authors of reviews are welcome.

Reviews must be high-quality, authoritative, state-of-the-art accounts of the selected research field. They should be timely and add to the existing literature, rather than duplicate existing articles, and should be of general interest to the journal's wide readership.

All Reviews and Perspectives undergo rigorous peer review, in the same way as regular research papers.

Review articles published in Chemistry Education Research and Practice include narrative, integrative or systematic reviews and meta-analyses and should align with the goals and scope of the journal.

Thought experiments outlining a theoretical position or personal opinion without including a literature basis, pedagogical recommendations or evidence of implementation are not considered in the journal.

For more information on preparing a review-style article please see our 2021 Editorial (DOI: 10.1039/D1RP90006D )

Full papers contain original scientific work that has not been published previously.

Comments and Replies are a medium for the discussion and exchange of scientific opinions between authors and readers concerning material published in Chemistry Education Research and Practice. 

For publication, a Comment should present an alternative analysis of and/or new insight into the previously published material. Any Reply should further the discussion presented in the original article and the Comment. Comments and Replies that contain any form of personal attack are not suitable for publication. 

Comments that are acceptable for publication will be forwarded to the authors of the work being discussed, and these authors will be given the opportunity to submit a Reply. The Comment and Reply will both be subject to rigorous peer review in consultation with the journal’s Editorial Board where appropriate. The Comment and Reply will be published together.

Readership information

Chemical education researchers and teachers of chemistry in universities and schools

Subscription information

Chemistry Education Research and Practice is free to access thanks to sponsorship by the Royal Society of Chemistry's Education Division

Online only : ISSN 1756-1108

*2022 Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate Analytics, 2023)

**The median time from submission to first decision including manuscripts rejected without peer review from the previous calendar year

***The median time from submission to first decision for peer-reviewed manuscripts from the previous calendar year

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• Open access
• Published: 28 November 2019

Progressing chemistry education research as a disciplinary field

• Keith S. Taber   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1798-331X 1  

Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Science Education Research volume  1 , Article number:  5 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

6760 Accesses

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This article offers a viewpoint regarding the current status of chemistry education research (CER) as a scholarly field within science education, and suggests priorities for future directions of work in the field. The article begins by briefly considering what makes something a discrete field of activity, and what makes such a field ‘scientific’. This provides a basis for understanding and evaluating CER, and informs a consideration of imperatives and priorities for progressing the field. In particular, it is suggested one emphasis should be on areas of work which can be considered ‘inherent’ to CER as they arise from essential aspects of chemistry teaching and learning, and some examples of such inherent research foci (the ‘chemist’s triplet’; models in chemistry; chemical explanations) are briefly discussed.

Introduction: CER as a field

This article discusses chemistry education research (CER) as a field, and considers both why it is reasonable to consider CER as a discrete field (rather than just a domain within science education research) and how this has implications for both what is considered to count as CER – such that not all educational research carried out in chemistry teaching and learning contexts (CTLC) should be considered inherently CER – and for setting priorities in the field. It is argued that a productive scientific field encompasses progressive research programmes (RP), and some suggestions are made for timely RP.

There is a range of indicators that can be used to consider the extent to which an area of activity can be considered a scholarly field (Fensham, 2004 ), and based on these indicators CER is now well-established as field in its own right. CER has its own international journals (in particular, Chemistry Education Research and Practice and the Journal of Chemical Education ) and regular conference series; there has been a stream of scholarly books on the subject from major publishers, and there is now a specialised book series ( Advances in Chemistry Education , published by the Royal Society of Chemistry). There are academics with chairs in the subject, who lead research groups focused on chemistry education, and offer specialist doctoral training.

A field needs to be focused on some sphere of activity or phenomena, and in the case of CER this is the practice of chemistry education. As an area of practice, chemistry education might be generally equated to teaching the curriculum subject ‘chemistry’. The core phenomena of interest in educational research are teaching and learning (Pring, 2000 ), and so logically the primary foci of CER are the teaching and learning of chemistry. The wider scope of CER encompasses areas of enquiry linked to these foci. This would include such matters as the chemistry curriculum (what is set out to be taught and learnt; how disciplinary chemical knowledge is represented in the curriculum); how learning of chemistry is assessed; the discipline-specific aspects of how teachers are prepared for and developed in their work; the design of teaching resources (such as textbooks and digital tools) that represent chemical knowledge in ways informed by knowledge of human learning processes or to support particular pedagogies.

Teaching is activity that is intended to bring about some specific learning. The notion of (specifically) chemistry teaching therefore has most traction in a context where there is a formal curriculum having ‘strong classification’, that is where the curriculum is divided into clearly distinguished subjects with identifiable areas of content (Sadovnik, 1991 ). This is worth noting, both because there has historically been debate on the place of discrete sciences, versus integrated or coordinated science in the curriculum at school level (Jenkins, 2007 ), and because in recent years the notion of ‘STEM’ (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) has shifted from being mainly seen as a label for a grouping of (discrete but) related disciplines, to a recognised curriculum area, and potentially indeed a curriculum subject, in the school curriculum (Chesky & Wolfmeyer, 2015 ). That is, in some national contexts STEM remains largely a construct offering a convenient branding for a strategic alliance of those wishing to raise funding support for, and public awareness of the importance of, the sciences and related areas. Yet, in other contexts the traditional boundaries between the natural sciences, and between pure and applied science, are being fundamentally questioned both in terms of science practice and science education.

In such a context, CER may not be understood as purely focused on teaching and learning in classes formally labelled chemistry, as the teaching and learning of chemical topics (e.g., acids), and specific concepts (e.g., oxidation) can occur in the context of ‘science’ lessons - or indeed STEM classes, or even within the context of curriculum offerings based around interdisciplinary projects that do not explicitly acknowledge traditional subjects (Rennie, Venville, & Wallace, 2012 ), or less formal making and tinkering activities where STEM knowledge might be developed on a just-in-time basis (Bevan, Gutwill, Petrich, & Wilkinson, 2015 ). Yet this raises the question: why consider teaching these topics in such contexts as chemistry teaching (and so within the remit of CER) rather than science teaching or STEM teaching, or just teaching.

There is also a criticism that the science taught in formal education systems is often learned as a set of discrete topics, whereas one core metaphysical commitment of science is to seek overarching ideas and superordinate concepts that can subsume previously discrete notions (Taber, 2006 ). This raises the question of whether compartmentalisation of the curriculum is a barrier to students linking up their learning (Taber, 2018a ) both within and across subject divides.

Such considerations raise an existential challenge to CER as a field. There is a very well established field of science education (Fensham, 2004 ), so it might be asked whether CER is any more than just a term covering those studies falling within science education research (SER) where the material being taught happens to be chemical. Unless there is a case to be made in response to such a challenge, CER might be seen to be simply one convenient administrative category when considering studies carried out within SER, rather than something with its own character.

Indeed, there is a strong argument to be made that the recognition of CER, and PER (physics education research), etcetera, as discrete fields owes much to the work done in higher education by researchers from within university science departments and faculties. In that context CER seems a natural category for those employed by chemistry departments - and having little opportunity to come into direct contact with teaching and learning beyond that context. That rationale offers little to those primarily concerned with teaching of school chemistry.

CER as a compound of its elements, not a mixture

Another argument that has been made is that much research that takes place in chemistry teaching and learning contexts (CTLC) is addressing general educational questions, where the choice of the particular study context may be little more than a matter of convenience, or reflect the professional concerns of practitioners enquiring into their practice to see if they can fruitfully apply recommended innovations in their own teaching. That is, although the work is carried out in a chemistry classroom or some other CTLC, that offers little more than a backdrop to an examination of some general educational focus: for example, about how best to organise a mixed-ability class into productive working groups. These are questions where the findings from one classroom may not automatically generalise to other classrooms, but where the CTLC is only one potentially relevant variable among many (age of students; gender; diversity of school population in terms of socio-economic status; proportion of students accessing the learning in a second or additional language; etc.)

This type of study has been labelled as ‘collateral’ CER (Taber, 2013b ). By contrast, ‘embedded’ CER (Taber, 2013b ) goes beyond this by carefully linking particular aspects of the specific subject matter being taught to the general educational issue - for example, not just how to implement a flipped learning approach in this class (which happens to be a first year undergraduate chemistry course), but how to best profit from the affordances of flipped learning when introducing the topic of transition metal complexes (or the Nernst equation, or whatever) given the particular challenges in teaching and learning that material.

An inherent assumption here is that the outcomes of the research are in a substantive sense dependent on teaching that is informed by the specialist knowledge about teaching and learning of specific material that a subject specialist teacher brings to the classroom: that is, the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) (Kind, 2009 ) that evolves as a kind of meta-knowledge formed from a hybridisation of subject knowledge and general pedagogic knowledge, and developed through testing out in classroom practice (Taber, 2018b ). PCK is not just a mixture or assemblage of subject and pedagogic knowledge, but something new, formed by ‘reacting’ these through planning, teaching, and evaluating classes.

An interesting thought experiment to distinguish embedded CER from collateral CER might be to consider a CER research report where every mention of chemistry, particular chemical topics, specific chemical concepts, etcetera, has been redacted; and then to ask the question whether the (now non-disciplinary-specific) conclusions of the study can still be considered robust. If we judged the study offered convincing implications independent of the disciplinary context (which is no longer available to a reader seeking to evaluate the redacted manuscript), then these have not been bound to the specific challenges of teaching the subject matter. Such research could be considered metaphorically a mixture of educational research and chemistry, as these components can be separated out, rather than a compound that has its own characteristic CER properties.

Of course, embedded CER might not be so different in kind than embedded PER or other educational research where the specifics of the curriculum context are intrinsic to the research. There may be differences in detail in how teachers can, for example, usefully apply Bloom’s taxonomy to planning different lessons (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001 ), but perhaps (and this may be considered an empirical question) those differences in detail are no greater when (a) comparing the teaching of homologous series with the teaching of electromagnetic induction, or with the teaching about the causes of the industrial revolution; than when (b) comparing the teaching of homologous series with teaching about Lewis acid theory, or with teaching about electronegativity. If that were so, then CER still seems little more than a bureaucratic label, albeit for (i) findings that are contingent on the peculiarities of specific disciplinary content (where that content falls within the discipline of chemistry), rather than (ii) findings presented as widely generalisable to different teaching contexts, which just happen to derive from a CTLC.

• Inherent disciplinary educational research

Yet, it is also the case that a discipline such as chemistry does present its own particular challenges that are somewhat distinct from those found in other disciplines, and which are also widely relevant when teaching and learning beyond a single teaching topic and across the discipline. I will here suggest two such ‘essential’ foci for ‘inherent’ CER (Taber, 2013b ) that explores issues intrinsic to the teaching of the discipline.

Johnstone ( 1982 ) mooted the idea that chemistry teaching was especially challenging because it asked students to think - often at the same time - about the macroscopic (bench-scale) phenomenon, the molecular level structure of matter, and the specialised forms of representation used in chemistry. The so-called chemist’s triplet has become a particular core concern in chemistry education where it has been recognised as critically important in teaching and learning the subject, and so has become a key focus of research and scholarship (Taber, 2013a ; Talanquer, 2011 ). This issue is important across the teaching of many topics within chemistry, but does not apply directly in other disciplines. Johnstone suggested biology and physics faced similar, although not identical, issues, but his arguments have not been seen as so centrally important in teaching those subjects. In particular, the ubiquitous use of the ‘chemical language’ of formulae and equations to bridge between the molar and molecular levels in explaining chemical phenomena is characteristic of much chemistry teaching (Taber, 2009 ).

Another issue that is especially important in chemistry relates to the nature of models met in learning the subject. Again, this seems to be an especially pertinent issue for chemistry education, where an understanding of the nature of models and modelling (both those used in chemistry itself, and the various teaching models employed to introduce abstract chemical ideas) is essential to make sense of the concepts of the subject and make good progress in learning (Taber, 2010 ). Models of atomic and molecular structure, mathematical models, notions of ideal gases, typologies (such as metal and non-metal, types of bonding), metaphorical language (sharing electrons, electrophilic attack, etc.) and historically shifting concepts (oxidation, acid, etc.), and so forth, are ubiquitous, and much of this conceptual apparatus has become second nature for the teacher - for whom, subjectively, a double bond has likely become as real an object as a conical flask. Supporting students to develop the epistemological sophistication to make sense of the concepts of chemistry, and to keep in mind the ontological status of the ‘objects’ they meet in their studies (e.g., dative bonds, electron deficient compounds, anti-aromaticity, transition states, hybridised atomic orbitals …) is a key challenge for the CER community (Taber, 2019a ). Models and modelling in science and teaching is certainly an important theme across SER (Gilbert, 2004 ), but has proved especially vexing in chemistry teaching, and would seem a clear imperative for research in CER.

CER as a scientific research field

There are many recognised academic fields across the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts. Education as an academic subject is something of a scavenger - founded on other subjects (usually considered to include philosophy, history, psychology and sociology, and these days increasingly economics), intimately tied with the wide range of disciplines that are found in curriculum (such as, inter alia, chemistry), and regularly borrowing ideas and perspectives widely from other areas of the academy. Educational research is often considered essentially social science, but the diversity of research and scholarship carried out in some education faculties spans a full range from pure experiments to literary criticism.

Chemistry education is clearly not a natural science as it focuses on social, not natural, phenomena, but scholars working in CER generally consider they are seeking to be scientific in their work. In natural sciences, such as chemistry, research traditions develop where researchers are inducted into the norms of the research field, and mature traditions of work can be characterised by a disciplinary matrix (Kuhn, 1970 , 1974/1977 ) that can include ontological commitments (e.g., matter is comprised of sub-microscopic quanticles) and epistemological and methodological standards (such the forms of laboratory technique and analysis considered suitable in a line of work) as well as conventions relating to how arguments should be presented, use of technical vocabulary and specialised forms of representation, and such matters as which journals and conferences are appropriate targets for research outputs.

Compared with chemistry, CER admits a wide range of theoretical perspectives (deriving from the learning sciences, sociology, etc.) and methodological approaches. That could be considered a sign of a lack of maturity in the field, but could also, alternatively, reflect the complexity, and context-dependence, of the core phenomena of teaching and learning (Taber, 2014 ). There are guidelines on what makes educational research scientific (National Research Council Committee on Scientific Principles for Educational Research, 2002 ) which acknowledge the diversity of approaches possible, subject to meeting quality criteria in terms of research design and execution.

One helpful idea from history and philosophy of science is the observation that research in natural science disciplines such as chemistry becomes organised into research programmes (RP) that have inherent and explicit core commitments (to what is to be taken for granted; to what classes of research questions are to be addressed) shared by researchers working in that tradition, and which provide sufficient commonality to allow work from different scholars and research groups to iteratively build up a better understanding (Lakatos, 1970 ). These RP are not exclusive, in the sense that alternative parallel programmes taking different approaches to explore the same phenomena are possible, but the agreement on ‘hard core’ assumptions and research purposes allows those working within a particular RP to evaluate whether it remains a ‘progressive’ programme.

A progressive RP is one where empirical and theoretical work are feeding into each other to develop better understandings (as opposed to, for example, where theory is simply being adjusted after the fact to ‘save the phenomena’ as empirical tests fail to demonstrate predicted outcomes). Within this model, the scientist may sometimes ‘quarantine’ anomalous results (Lakatos, 1970 ), that is, acknowledge they challenge current theory, but choose to put this aside as a problem to be addressed later - something a strictly falsificationalist model (Popper, 1989 ) would not allow - against a global judgement that the programme is, on balance , making progress.

Striking a balance in structuring CER as a field

The historian of science Thomas Kuhn ( 1959/1977 ) referred to the ‘essential tension’ in science between (a) the priority of the established research traditions (a priority often reflected in academic appointments and promotions and, in particular, awards of research grants), which require scientists to be disciplined in following lines of work that have previously been found fruitful, and (b) the importance of the creative insight which, recognising which anomalies are potentially significant, enables a completely new conceptualisation that might revolutionise a field. Hegemony can be an impediment to progress in science (Josephson, 1992 ), just as elsewhere, but even if the creative research scientist adopts something of the mentality of bricolage, seeking to find what works in relation to a new problem (Feyerabend, 1975/1988 ; Kincheloe, 2005 ), scientific fields are largely characterised by structured research programmes.

The present author’s experience of having edited a research journal dedicated to CER for over 7 years suggests that anyone reviewing CER today would find considerable diversity in (a) the specific foci of research, (b) theoretical perspectives used to conceptualise that research, and (c) methodological strategies and tactics adopted (e.g., Teo, Goh, & Yeo, 2014 ). It is clearly important that CER remains open to new ideas, new insights, new directions of research (Sevian, 2017 ), but there is also a case to be made for adopting a more programmatic approach that allows studies to share sufficient groundwork to build iteratively on each other (Taber, 2017 ).

Recommendations for the field

The danger I have sought to highlight in this article, is that CER may largely be (or become) a label for education research studies that are either only addressing general questions and happen to be undertaken in CTLC, or embedded studies that address specifics of teaching and learning particular chemistry content, but which are tied to teaching that topic, at that academic level, with limited scope for generalisation beyond the specific context.

Two recommendations that follow from the analysis are offered here. The first is to encourage work that is ‘inherent’ CER because it addresses issues especially, indeed essentially, important across teaching chemistry. The second relates to identifying the programmes of work that link to the major challenges that arise in teaching and learning chemistry.

Identifying inherent CER

I have already mentioned two examples reflecting major challenges faced by practitioners: the so-called ‘chemist’s triplet’ and the ubiquity of models in teaching and learning chemistry. I briefly revisit these, and suggest another related focus for research attention (chemical explanations).

Applying the chemist’s triplet

One important RP concerns understanding how the core CER notion of the chemist’s triplet can be used to better conceptualise learning difficulties and plan curriculum and teaching. Johnstone ( 1982 ) highlighted how the triplet put a burden on students, but the nature of chemistry suggests that authentic chemistry education needs to often simultaneously employ the three aspects of the triplet. There is a good deal of groundwork in this area (Gilbert & Treagust, 2009 ), but it is questionable whether this has yet fed widely into informing classroom practice.

Johnstone’s initial characterisation of three levels has the elegance of a simple formulation that teachers can readily appreciate and relate to. Most commonly, the triplet is understood in terms of Johnstone’s ( 1982 ) original macroscopic and submicrosopic (as well as the symbolic representational) levels, but Talanquer ( 2011 , p. 180) emphasises the contrast between the ‘descriptive and functional’ level “at which phenomena are experienced, observed and described” and the ‘explanatory’ level “at which phenomena are explained”. A slightly different reconceptualisation sees the phenomena observed (and often perceived by learners in relation to everyday ideas, e.g., burning, disappearing) to be re-described both at the macroscopic level in terms of technical chemical concepts and categories (e.g., combustion: reaction with oxygen, dissolving), and then in terms of the explanatory models of the structure of matter at the submicroscopic / nanoscale (Taber, 2013a ). In this version, the symbolic is not seen as a discrete level, but as representing, and sometimes bridging explanations across, the two levels of chemical description. As these brief accounts suggest, there are different ways the ‘levels’ – and how they link to models, theories, and explanations - can be understood. There is clearly scope for more enquiry into how these ideas can best support chemistry teaching.

Making sense of models and representations

The second issue concerns the high frequency of models and related devices (e.g., metaphors) met in learning chemistry. Again, an authentic chemistry education (that reflects the disciplinary practices of the subject) cannot proceed by excluding these, so work is needed to support learners in developing more ‘epistemological nous’ (for example, not seeing atomic models as realistic) and applying metacognition to critically examine their learning (e.g., asking critically what does ‘sharing’ electrons mean?) Perhaps, teachers might initially question the wisdom here, but we would recognise progress when students come to regularly respond to teaching by asking difficult questions such as (i) how can the particles be touching in a solid when the spaces between them change with heating or cooling; (ii) why do the protons in a nucleus not repel each other so much that the nucleus disintegrates; (iii) in what sense, exactly, is a methane molecule a tetrahedron (Taber, 2019a )?

Explanation

Another potential focus for productive research is the theme of explanations, and this might be an area that could be linked to the developing focus on learning progressions in chemistry (Sevian & Talanquer, 2014 ). Explanation is core to chemistry (and often links to the triplet, and to the various models used in the subject).

In recent years there has been considerable focus on the process of scientific argumentation and how this can be modelled in teaching (Erduran, Simon, & Osborne, 2004 ; Newton, Driver, & Osborne, 1999 ). However the related, and equally core, notion of explanation has had much less attention, with very little work looking at the nature of students’ explanations (Taber & Watts, 2000 ) or how students can critique or construct explanations (Taber, 2007 ). This would seem to be an important area where there is much potential for useful research. Ideally this might be the focus of learning progression research (Alonzo & Gotwals, 2012 ), to first explore typical levels of student competencies at different grades, and then to inform curriculum design and teaching that can support progression.

Responding to key challenges in chemistry education

There are many other potential areas of work in CER that can increase our understanding and so better support teaching. Probably the two biggest challenges to chemistry education, especially where chemistry is not an elective subject but one all students are expected to study, relate to relevance and difficulty.

Making chemistry relevant to all

Chemistry is obviously (to a chemist) relevant to everything around us in the material world, but, as a science, chemistry is concerned with substances and their properties and interactions - and that is already an abstraction when very few of the materials young people come into contact with in everyday life are pure substances. There is a challenge therefore to make chemistry relevant (Eilks & Hofstein, 2015 ). One response might be not to teach chemistry as such in the lower grades (e.g., up to age 12 or 13?), but rather a form of material science that would be more context-based (Bennett, Hogarth, & Lubben, 2003 ) and enquiry-based (Schwab, 1962 ) - possibly linked to environmental and socio-scientific issues (Zeidler, 2014 ) - and which would provide both practical experience and background knowledge to be used as the foundations of a formal study of chemistry in later grades.

Another suggestion (perhaps once students progress to those later grades) is to use practical work as a means of introducing phenomena to be explored and explained, and so to provide epistemic relevance to the concepts of chemistry (Taber, 2015 ), given that more traditional approaches teach scientific concepts that are in effect answers to historical questions that most students have never had reason to ask. This might be a less efficient (i.e., slower) approach to teaching canonical concepts, but may be a more authentic reflection of chemistry as science, and a way of engaging students’ imaginations to develop rich conceptualisations that may ultimately offer better foundations for learning canonical models and theories.

• Scaffolding learning

That chemistry is a highly theoretical subject, as well as a laboratory subject, makes the introduction of a good deal of abstract material that many students find challenging, unavoidable. There is already a great deal of work exploring aspects of learners’ difficulties in understanding chemical concepts, and in particular their alternative conceptions and frameworks in the subject (Kind, 2004 ), and why these conceptions occur (Taber, 2002 , 2019a ). There is also work on supporting teachers by providing classroom diagnostic tools to identify student thinking (Treagust, 2006 ). Yet there is more to do, especially in supporting teachers to adopt research-informed teaching within existing curriculum and institutional constraints.

One notion that has been adopted in school teaching is that of ‘scaffolding’ as a strategy for supporting learners to master challenging ideas or skills. In practice, however, this sometimes amounts to little more than applying such common pedagogic tactics as breaking complex material down, offering students support in the form of hand-outs and hints, or expecting group-work to provide sufficient peer support. The idea of scaffolding, however, derives from a particular perspective based on the works of Vygotsky ( 1978 ), that offers potential for providing more customised, individualised, support for students given sufficient information about their particular characteristic as learners (Taber, 2018c ). In principle, then, scaffolding could be a very powerful strategy, but needs to be applied in relation to both the particular learners and subject matter. Research to explore how viable the approach is when used by busy teachers with large classes could be very valuable, but also challenging to carry out.

Conclusions

Space here does not allow the development or augmentation of these examples, but hopefully they sufficiently make the point: for CER to progress as a field (i) it needs to take as strong foci the particular issues of teaching and learning chemistry , that is, those issues that are specific, or especially pronounced, or at least need to be understood within particular contexts, in the practice of chemistry teaching; and (ii) there needs to be a programmatic flavour to much of the work undertaken - to enable ready communication between researchers; to facilitate studies to clearly build iteratively on what has gone before; and to allow the CER community to make evaluations of which lines of work are progressive, and so worthy of attention and resourcing.

This is not an argument for a ‘closed-shop’ with exclusive programmes of research, nor for excluding the maverick or idiosyncratic from the field. CER benefits from cross-fertilisation with other disciplines, and the ‘essential tension’ needs to be held in balance. This article is certainly not suggesting a need for a regimentation of research moderated by intellectual thought police, but rather that those leading the field should offer heuristic guidance to channel the most promising directions for enquiry. For any field to remain viable there must be a semblance of structure and order perceived as standing out from the background of diverse activity. CER is not a field of chemistry in the way that transition metal chemistry is, or organometallic chemistry is, or photochemistry is: its primary phenomena are social and psychological (teaching, learning), not chemical.

This can present challenges for CER researchers. For those transitioning from exclusively undertaking research in the natural sciences, this can require a substantive reorientation in relation to both the nature of knowledge claims and the kinds of approaches that need to be applied. As two obvious differences: natural materials subject to investigation in the chemistry laboratory neither expect a duty of care from researchers (we do not need to take precautions to protect the integrity of strips of magnesium or aliquots of sulphuric acid that are subject to laboratory manipulations), nor change their properties in response to being selected as the sample to be tested or because they suspect they know what the researcher is looking for. By contrast, people are entitled to expect researchers to both avoid doing anything likely to harm them (which includes disrupting their learning), and to take their preferences (such as declining to participate) into account; and may also have their attitudes and motivations (and so their responses) modified by the attention of researchers and/or tacitly communicated researcher expectations (Taber, 2019b ).

For those based in chemistry or other natural science departments, another challenge can be the attitudes and perceptions of colleagues. The norms of CER may not be appreciated by colleagues with no background in research in the social sciences, which are often considered to be ‘softer’ (and so by implication less rigorous or demanding) than the ‘hard’ sciences. Commitment to CER enquiries may not always be accepted as a valid alternative to chemistry research, especially in a context where university research is evaluated along disciplinary lines and CER publications are considered ‘education’ rather than ‘chemistry’ outputs.

For CER to count as ‘disciplinary’ research it needs to be an identifiable discipline in its own right and not simply borrow credence from being associated with the discipline of chemistry. I hope this article has offered some ideas regarding how this can be maintained and developed in practice.

Availability of data and materials

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Abbreviations

Chemistry education research

Chemistry teaching and learning contexts

Pedagogical content knowledge

Physics education research

Research programmes

Science education research

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics

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Taber, K.S. Progressing chemistry education research as a disciplinary field. Discip Interdscip Sci Educ Res 1 , 5 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s43031-019-0011-z

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• Chemistry education
• Chemist’s triplet
• Teaching about models and modelling
• Epistemological relevance
• Teaching about scientific explanations

Overview of Chemical Education Research (CER)

As identified by the nrc report on discipline-based education research (nrc, 2012), “the goals of dber are to:.

• understand how people learn the concepts, practices, and ways of thinking of science and engineering;
• understand the nature and development of expertise in a discipline;
• help identify and measure appropriate learning objectives and instructional approaches that advance students toward those objectives;
• contribute to the knowledge base in a way that can guide the translation of DBER findings to classroom practice; and
• identify approaches to make science and engineering education broad and inclusive.”

Chemistry education research (CER)-specific area of Discipline-based education research (DBER).

A brief history of the development of chemistry education research as a discipline can be found in the NRC report (NRC, 2012) and a white paper by George Bodner (Bodner, 2011). The first doctoral programs in chemistry departments that awarded Ph.D. degrees for CER arose in the 1990s at the University of Oklahoma, the University of Northern Colorado, and Purdue University. The first Ph.D. in CER was awarded in 1993, with the first postdoctoral appointment in 1994. The Chemistry Education Research Committee itself was established by the ACS Division of Chemical Education in 1994.

The definition of what constitutes chemistry education research was addressed in several articles in the  Journal of Chemical Education . Patricia Metz (Metz, 1994) provided an overview of “What is Chemistry Education Research?” in a special issue of the journal dedicated to research in chemical education. Later that same year, the report of an ACS Division of Chemical Education Taskforce was published (Bunce et al., 1994). This Task Force on Chemical Education Research was appointed with the task of drafting a document that defined chemistry education research. A further description was published a few years later when the CER feature was added to  JCE  (Bunce & Robinson, 1997). Part of the mission statement for the feature provided guidelines for the content in submissions.

This feature aims to provide reliable and valid reports of chemical education research that address how students learn, the factors affecting learning, and the methods for evaluating that learning. The results reported should be understandable to practicing chemistry teachers and directly applicable to the teaching/learning process. … the research must be theory based; the questions asked should relevant to chemical educators and able to be tested through the experimental design proposed; the data collected must be verifiable; and the results must be generalizable.

The issue of what constitutes quality work in CER has been addressed more recently by Taber (Taber, 2012). Additionally, resources such as the book the  Nuts and Bolts of Chemical Education Research  (Bunce & Cole, 2007) are now available to provide guidance to individuals wishing to learn more about conducting research in chemistry education.

The roots of CER can be found in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and the desire to improve classroom practice. The  Journal of Chemical Education was established in 1924 to serve as a living textbook and a means to disseminate best practices for teaching chemistry, while the Chemical Education Research Feature did not appear until 1997. The scholarship of teaching and learning emphasizes reflective practice and the use of classroom-based evidence to inform teaching. The boundaries between SoTL and CER are blurry, but a paper by Bob Beichner (Beichner, 2009) in physics education research (PER) provides an informative description that should also serve to inform the CER community of the difference between physics education research and curriculum development or SoTL projects. Keith Taber, the current editor of  Chemistry Education Research and Practice , wrote an editorial in which he describes his perspective of the breath of the field ranging from SoTL to CER (Taber, 2012). This transition from practice to CER is also reflected in the history of the Gordon Research Conference in chemical education (Towns, 2010). It began in 1994 with the title “Innovations in College Chemistry Teaching” with a focus on the perspectives and challenges of teaching undergraduate chemistry courses. Over time, the conference evolved to include more presentations on research-based approaches. The name was changed in 2002 to “Chemistry Education Research and Practice” in order to reflect the changing nature of the conference.

There have been several reviews of the work that has been done in CER, including the challenges and implications of that work (Herron & Nurrenbern, 1999; Gilbert et al., 2004; Bodner, 2011; Towns & Kraft, 2011). In their 2004 article, Gilbert et al. summarize the status of chemistry education research at that time and identify 6 types of chemistry education research. They also explore reasons for the lack of impact of CER on the practice of teaching chemistry.

Challenges related to hiring and promotion for academic positions in chemistry education research have been described in a report of the Task Force on Hiring and Promotion in Chemical Education appointed by the ACS Division of Chemical Education (Oliver-Hoyo et al., 2008). The goal of the task force was to provide guidance for departments seeking to hire faculty in the area of chemical education and for individuals wishing to establish academic careers in chemical education. One of the challenges identified in obtaining tenure in CER has been related to departmental expectations related to publications. This led to articles that describe the rate of publication in CER compared to more traditional areas of chemistry education research (Pienta, 2004; Craig et al., 2012) as well as one that discussion impact factors and perceptions of the community as to what constitutes top tier journals for publishing work in CER (Towns & Kraft, 2012).

Bodner, G. (2011).  Status ,  contributions ,  and future directions of discipline based education research: The development of research in chemical education as a field of study . Paperpresented at the Second Committee Meeting on the Status, Contributions, and FutureDirections of Discipline-Based Education Research.  http://www7.nationalacademies.org/bose/DBER_Bodner_October_Paper.pdf .

Bunce, D.; Gabel, D.; Herron, J.D.; and Jones, L. “Report of the Task Force on Chemical Education Research of the American Chemical Society Division of Chemical Education,” JCE, 1994, 71(10), p 850

Bunce, D.M. and Robinson, W.R. “Research in chemical education – the third brand of our profession,” JCE, 1997, 74(9), p1076

Nuts and Bolts of Chemical Education Research  (ACS Symposium Series), Editors: Diane M. Bunce and Renee S. Cole, Oxford University Press, 2007.

Craig, A.F.; Koch, D.L.; Buffington, A.; and Grove, N. “Narrowing the Gap? Revisiting Publication Rates in chemistry Education” JCE (Articles ASAP)

Gilbert, J.K.; Justi, R.; Van Driel, J.H.; de Jong, O.; and Treagust, D.F., “Securing a future for chemical education,” CERP, 2004, 5, 5-14

Herron, J.D. and Nurrenbern, S.C., “Chemical Education Research: Improving chemistry learning,” JCE, 1999, 76(10), p. 1353

Metz, P.A., “Introduction to the Symposium,” JCE, 1994, 71(3), p 180

(NRC 2012) Committee on the Status, Contributions, and Future Directions of Discipline-Based Education Research; Board on Science Education; Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education; National Research Council (2012). Discipline-Based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering, The National Academies Press.  http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13362

Oliver-Hoyo, M.T.; Jones, J.L.; Kelter, P.B.; Bauer, C. F.; Clevenger, J.V.; Cole, R.S.; and Sawrey, B.A., “Hiring and Promotion in Chemical Education,” JCE, 2008, 85(7), 898.

Pienta, N.J. “Measuring Productivity in College-level chemistry education scholarship” JCE, 2004, 81(4), p 579-583.

Taber, K.S., “Recognizing quality in reports of chemistry education research and practice,” CERP, 2012, 13, 4-7.

Taber, K.S. “The nature and scope of chemistry education as a field,” CERP, 2012, 13, 159-160

Towns, Marcy “A Brief History of the Gordon Research Conference in Chemistry Education Research and Practice” JCE 2010, 87(11), 1133-1134.

Towns, M., and Kraft, A. (2011).  Review and synthesis of research in chemical education from 2000-2010 . Paper presented at the Second Committee Meeting on the Status,Contributions, and Future Directions of Discipline-Based Education Research.  http://www7.nationalacademies.org/bose/DBER_Towns_October_Paper.pdf .

Towns, M.H. & Kraft, A. “The 2010 rankings of chemical education and science education journals by faculty engaged in chemical education research” JCE, 2012, 89(1), pp 16-20.

The use of frameworks in chemistry education research

First published on 1st September 2023

Extant literature has emphasized the importance of education research being theory-based. To this end, many research articles have a distinct “theoretical framework” section describing the theoretical underpinnings that inform the research. Nevertheless, there is large variation in how explicit articles are regarding their use of frameworks in the research process. This work describes a literature review focusing on the use of frameworks (broadly defined) in chemistry education research. Our sample draws on research articles published in Chemistry Education Research and Practice and the Journal of Chemical Education from 2018 to 2021 ( n = 457). The longitudinal analysis revealed general trends about the presence of frameworks in research articles over four years as well as the types of frameworks commonly used. In addition, we analyzed how frameworks were used within individual research articles published in 2021, focusing on chemistry education research articles and research articles published across biology, engineering, mathematics, and physics education research journals ( n = 595). Our goal is to describe how frameworks were used to open a dialogue and inform future chemistry education research.

Introduction

Frameworks in cer.

“…a system of ideas, aims, goals, theories and assumptions about knowledge; about how research should be carried out; and about how research should be reported that influences what kind of experiments can be carried out and the type of data that result from these experiments” (p. v, “Prologue”).

One of the key points we would like to draw attention to is that theoretical frameworks should influence interpretive and methodological decisions throughout the research process. This is highlighted in Bodner and Orgill's (2007) book, where each framework is described along with implications for analysis and interpretation processes and techniques. That said, theoretical frameworks are important because different theoretical frameworks may lead to different approaches toward data interpretation, with implications for methodological choices, conclusions reached, and the resulting suggestions made to researchers and practitioners. This has been illustrated across DBER, with various studies applying different theoretical frameworks to the same dataset, illustrating how different frameworks lead to different predictions, explanations, and inferences related to students’ reasoning ( e.g. , Elby, 2000 ; Southerland et al. , 2001 ; Harrer et al. , 2013 ; Gouvea and Simon, 2018 ; Lira and Gardner, 2020 ; Rodriguez and Towns, 2021 ). In this sense, we can view a theoretical framework as a model that we use to explain and predict phenomena, recognizing that often there are multiple models to describe the same phenomenon, such as different perspectives related to the nature and structure of knowledge ( Elby, 2000 ; Rodriguez and Towns, 2021 ). Thus, criteria related to robust scientific models [ e.g. , consistency with data, explanatory and predictive power, etc. ; ( Passmore et al. , 2016 )] can and should be applied to how we think about theoretical frameworks.

With the various ways theoretical frameworks can inform a study, it is important to consider the research goals when selecting a framework to ensure alignment. To provide researchers with guidance in selecting an appropriate theoretical framework, Bodner and Orgill (2007) broadly grouped frameworks thematically into three categories: constructivist frameworks that emphasize the continuous and active development of concepts based on individual and collective observations ( e.g. , constructivism and social constructivism, symbolic interactionism, models and modelling, pedagogical content knowledge); hermeneutic frameworks that emphasize iterative and cyclic analysis of the relationship between part of a text (broadly defined) and the whole text to generate meaning, often related to understanding human experiences ( e.g. , hermeneutics, phenomenology, phenomenography, action research, ethnology and ethnomethodology, situated cognition, communities of practice, narrative analysis); and critical frameworks that emphasize social structures and concerns such as the uneven distribution of power ( e.g. , critical theory, feminism, Afrocentricity). This organization of theoretical frameworks is not exhaustive, and there may be some overlap of frameworks across categories, as well as potentially productive alternative approaches toward classiyfing frameworks; nevertheless, the grouping based on Bodner and Orgill (2007) provides a useful starting point for characterizing theoretical frameworks.

The three categories of frameworks presented in Bodner and Orgill (2007) also generally align with three paradigms which often guide different education research studies: positivist (and post-positivist), interpretivist, and critical paradigms ( Treagust et al. , 2014 ). For instance, studies using constructivist frameworks tend to focus on objectively characterising the nature of students’ content knowledge or conceptual learning, aligning with the (post-)positivist paradigm which is characterised by seeking scientific objectivity and using experimental designs to develop causal explanations. In contrast, studies using hermeneutic frameworks are more concerned with how students and teachers experience the learning environment, which reflects the values of the interpretivist paradigm to focus on the situational and contextual nature of human experience. Lastly, studies using critical theory frameworks are aligned with the critical paradigm in that they share a focus on equity and challenging power dynamics in learning contexts. However, the alignment between frameworks and paradigms is complex, as exemplified when considering constructivism which can range from personal to critical constructivism ( Bodner and Orgill, 2007 ). Further, as paradigmatic perspectives are often unstated in research articles, it is important to recognize that any alignment suggested is based on our understanding of how different frameworks and paradigms are described in the literature.

Within DBER, researchers also use frameworks that are not necessarily theoretical in nature [ e.g. , analytical frameworks ( Luft et al. , 2022 ; Magana, 2022 )]. While there is a distinction between theoretical frameworks and other types of frameworks that may not be theoretical, other types of frameworks can still be beneficial for guiding studies and vary in purpose and intended use. From an engineering education perspective, Magana (2022) identifies the purpose of theoretical and conceptual frameworks as “defining, grounding, and explaining the focus of a study”; methodological and analytical frameworks “for planning and executing the methods of a study”; and, lastly, instructional design, pedagogical, and evaluation frameworks “for planning, delivering, and evaluating instruction.” These different types of frameworks are seen in chemistry as well. For example, the Anchoring Concepts Content Map (ACCM) released by the American Chemical Society – Exams Institute describes the content covered in an undergraduate chemistry curriculum ( Murphy et al. , 2012 ). This framework, developed by content experts, reflects the goals and organization of content to guide curriculum and assessment and can be viewed as belonging to the category of instructional design, pedagogical, and evaluation frameworks ( Magana, 2022 ). Importantly, the ACCM is not theoretical in nature; that is, it would provide little interpretive, predictive, or explanatory power in a study. Nevertheless, the ACCM can still be used as part of data analysis; for example, deductive coding using the ACCM can be a productive approach to develop themes related to content coverage within studies in a systematic review ( Bain and Towns, 2016 ; Hunter et al. , 2022 ). Similarly, the chemistry triplet has been used extensively within CER to guide data analysis ( Johnstone, 1982 ), and although it can provide insight regarding what makes chemistry challenging, it not inherently theoretical. To add to the complexity of framework use in CER, multiple frameworks may be compatible and useful for a single study and different types of frameworks may be used in tandem to shape an investigation. Furthermore, different types of frameworks ( e.g. , theoretical, conceptual, analytical, methodological) are often conceptualized in different ways with overlapping meanings, leading to challenges with differentiating between types of frameworks. Therefore, for this review, it is necessary to focus on frameworks broadly, and frameworks (without any modifier) will be used throughout this work to encompass all types of frameworks encountered in studies.

Frameworks for facilitating communication across communities

Transformative change also requires interactions across disciplinary communities. Exploring framework use in CER and across DBER fields can facilitate change in STEM higher education, with frameworks specifically having the ability to connect multiple domains of knowledge that enable needed connection amongst the currently siloed STEM higher education landscape ( Reinholz and Andrews, 2019 ). CER often draws frameworks from other communities, such as looking at mathematics education research for ways to investigate how students use mathematics in the context of chemistry ( Bain et al. , 2019 ). Therefore, it is more than shared disciplinary skills, language, and concepts that connect DBER communities. We are connected by theories and frameworks related to concerns such as how students learn and how to promote conceptual change. To this end, we are motivated by the broader goal of connecting communities of practice by using frameworks to facilitate the flow of knowledge across STEM disciplinary domains.

Purpose and guiding questions

(1) For CER articles published from 2018 to 2021 ( n = 457), what trends emerge related to the presence of frameworks (a) by year and (b) methods used?

(2) For DBER articles published in 2021 ( n = 595), what trends emerge related to the (a) presence of frameworks and (b) use of frameworks across each article?

(3) What types of frameworks were used in CER articles published from 2018 to 2021 ( n = 457)?

Positionality statement

In addition, we would like to acknowledge that we are authors on 28 research articles in our sample. We believe our experiences successfully publishing within and outside the field of CER helped us consider what would be meaningful to share with researchers regarding the use of theory and frameworks. To account for potential bias, our thematic analysis consisted of independent and group coding until consensus was reached and all discrepancies were resolved through discussion. Additionally, we sought to draw from supporting texts to determine framework types ( e.g. , Bodner and Orgill, 2007 ). We do not believe we are authorities to dictate how researchers should or should not use frameworks. That said, the goal of this work is not to evaluate the quality of individual research articles. We echo the sentiment by Ashwin (2012) that a published study can be viewed as the shared product of a community, produced through a social process involving peer-review and context-specific group norms. Thus, we believe it would not be productive to critique features of individual studies.

The final sample involved articles collected from two journals for each community (except for physics). Across each field, the journals selected were: Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education and CBE-Life Sciences Education (biology); the International Journal of Engineering Education and the Journal of Engineering Education (engineering); Educational Studies in Mathematics and the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education (mathematics); and Physical Review Physics Education Research (physics). Including the CER articles published in 2021 in CERP and JCE ( i.e. , a subset of the CER sample discussed previously), our final sample of DBER articles was n = 595. Provided in Table 1 , we have additional information regarding the DBER sample, including the journal author guidelines regarding framework use. For the remainder of the article, we use the journal abbreviations provided in Table 1 .

Data analysis

Reflected in our research questions, the initial stage of our analysis was relevant to both the longitudinal CER sample and the 2021 DBER sample. Here, we were interested in identifying the presence of a framework and contextualizing emerging trends using the journal author guidelines (see Table 1 ). The coding scheme for this analysis is presented in Table 2 . Coding for distinct framework sections identified whether authors included clear headings distinguished as describing theory or frameworks, including phrases such “theoretical framework”, “conceptual framework”, “analytical framework”, and other similarly-worded heading variations. When coding for discussed framework(s) used in the research , we identified if the authors described a framework or theory as guiding the study, irrespective of placement within a distinct framework section, and we wrote memos identifying the specific frameworks the authors described. To receive this code, the authors needed to define or describe key constructs for the framework or theory such that they could be used to guide and inform the study. Articles that only provided a literature review of studies that used the framework, as opposed to reviewing the framework itself, did not receive this code. Lastly, we coded for the research methodology (qualitative, quantitative, mixed methods, or reviews).

This analysis was then extended beyond the CER context to confirm its application to the DBER sample. Here, reliability was established by two researchers (J-MGR & JEN) analysing a randomized subset consisting of 5% of the (non-CER) DBER articles ( n = 30). This involved: (1) applying the codes provided in Table 2 and (2) assigning the previously discussed inductive categories used to characterize framework use across individual articles (Tiers 1–4). See Table 2 for the percent agreement and kappa values for the previously discussed codes. For the inductive categories related to tracking framework use across the DBER sample, the percent agreement was 88% and Cohen's kappa was 0.76, indicating moderate agreement ( Watts and Finkenstaedt-Quinn, 2021 ). Disagreements were then discussed to reach consensus. Lastly, we sought feedback from members of the biology, engineering, mathematics, and physics education research communities to lend validity to our claims related to each field, analogous to member-checking ( Carlson, 2010 ). We sent an excerpt of the manuscript to disciplinary experts, asking for comments on the claims and their impression of the results to provide insight regarding consistency with their experience in their community and their familiarity with the relevant journals, especially in terms of expectations regarding framework use. This process provided confirmation regarding the claims made to ensure we were adequately capturing community norms regarding framework use. Experts commented on preferences related to publication destination: for mathematics, a tendency to publish equally within both high-impact journals of JRME and ESM; for biology, a preference in publishing in LSE over BAMBED; for engineering, a preference in publishing in JEE over IJEE; and for physics, PRPER was confirmed as the primary discipline-specific journal.

Longitudinal trends of framework presence in CER

Furthermore, we examined trends regarding the inclusion of frameworks between different research methodologies used in the articles ( Table 4 ). Here, there was a statistically significant difference from the expected distribution across methodologies for both the presence of a distinct framework section (χ 2 = 30.6148, p < 0.001) and whether articles contained some discussion of the framework(s) guiding the study (χ 2 = 38.2645, p < 0.001). For each set of analyses, the standardised residuals were calculated to determine which methodologies differed significantly from the expected frequencies. For the presence of a distinct framework section, the standardised residuals were significant for articles using only qualitative ( z = ±4.663) and only quantitative methodologies ( z = ±3.954), compared to z = ±0.302 and 2.049 for mixed methods and reviews, respectively. Similarly, the standardised residuals for the chi-square examining whether framework(s) were discussed were also significant for articles that used only qualitative ( z = ±5.042) and only quantitative ( z = ±4.887) methodologies, compared to z = ±0.070 and 1.784 for mixed methods and reviews, respectively. Examining the frequencies in conjunction with the significant residuals, it appears that more qualitative studies and fewer quantitative studies contain a distinct framework section or description of the framework(s) than would be expected.

Contextualizing framework presence within the broader DBER landscape

As shown in Fig. 2 , there was large variation in whether studies had a framework across the disciplinary journals. Focusing on specific disciplines, in chemistry, 82% of the articles in CERP and 75% of the articles in JCE discussed a framework. This aligns with the authorship guidelines for both journals that emphasize authors should discuss framework(s) in relation to their work ( CERP Author Guidelines, 2023 ; JCE Author Guidelines, 2023 ). Framework use is also high in the mathematics education research articles, where 90% of the articles published in ESM and 88% of the articles published in JRME discussed frameworks. The high percentage of framework use across mathematics education research articles is notable considering the journal guidelines. Specifically, the ESM journal author guidelines do not explicitly mention the use of frameworks in submitted manuscripts ( ESM Author Guidelines, 2023 ), while the JRME author guidelines have a subsection on theoretical frameworks and how they should influence the study design ( JRME Author Guidelines, 2023 ). The high presence of framework use across mathematics education articles despite the difference in authorship guidelines suggests the use of frameworks may be an implicit expectation and norm within the mathematics education research community of practice. As for engineering and biology education research, the discussion of frameworks is mixed across their respective disciplinary journals. In engineering education research, 69% of studies discussed a framework in JEE, but only 14% of studies discussed a framework in IJEE. Biology education exhibits a similar difference across journals, where LSE has 40% of the research articles involving a discussion of frameworks, but only 5% of articles within BAMBED. In both cases, this reflects the authorship guidelines related to framework use for the respective journals ( BAMBED Author Guideline, 2023 ; IJEE Author Guidelines, 2023 ; JEE Author Guidelines, 2023 ; LSE Author Guidelines, 2023 ). Within PRPER, the primary discipline-specific journal for physics education research, 41% of articles involved a discussion of a framework. This is a similar percentage to that in LSE, even though the incorporation of a framework or theory is not discussed in the journal's author guidelines ( PRPER Author Guidelines, 2023 ). While there is variation across discipline and journal for whether a framework or frameworks are described, a general trend across disciplines was that most studies discussing a framework also included a distinct framework section.

Use of frameworks throughout 2021 DBER articles

In the case of Tier 1, articles primarily used a framework as supporting literature to situate and provide context for the work described. In addition to using the framework to contextualize the study, articles in Tier 2 drew connections between the framework and the data in the Findings and Conclusions. This was often observed as making a claim using the data presented and then commenting on how that relates to the framework. In the case of Tier 3, articles also used the framework and related constructs to analyze the data. Moreover, for articles in Tier 3, the organization and framing of the Findings were influenced by the framework, with the framework integrated throughout the Findings (as opposed to only being referenced). In the case of qualitative studies, this often stemmed from the framework's more explicit role in data analysis and thus generation of themes; quantitative studies typically emphasized the assumptions from the frameworks used to determine the constructs being measured ( e.g. , performance, identity, and belonging, etc. ). Lastly, studies in Tier 4 included the components of the previous tiers but also discussed how the framework(s) informed the data collection process; thus, articles in this tier discussed the framework and how it was relevant across the primary sections of the article (Data Collection, Data Analysis, Findings, Conclusions). Based on the patterns in how each group used frameworks, the primary feature that separates Tiers 1 and 2 from Tiers 3 and 4 is that studies in Tiers 3 and 4 incorporated the framework into the data analysis process (which then subsequently informed the organization of the Findings).

As suggested by Fig. 3 , the previously discussed findings pertaining to community norms regarding the presence of frameworks generally corresponds with how the articles use frameworks. For the biology and engineering journals, LSE and JEE author guidelines include the expectation for a framework, whereas BAMBED and IJEE author guidelines do not, and this appears to be reflected in the prevalence of articles in Tiers 3 and 4 for LSE and JEE, whereas there are proportionally more articles in the Tier 1 and 2 categories for BAMBED and IJEE. In contrast, the mathematics journals (JRME and ESM) both include a higher proportion of Tier 3 or Tier 4 articles versus Tier 1 or Tier 2 articles. This suggests that not only is the use of frameworks an established community norm ( Fig. 2 ), but also that frameworks may be expected to be used in a particular way ( i.e. , as part of data analysis), despite just one of the journals (JRME) emphasizing frameworks in the author guidelines (it is also interesting to note that JRME does not have any Tier 1 articles). Similarly, PRPER author guidelines do not discuss framework use, though a larger proportion of articles use frameworks in alignment with Tiers 3 and 4. Notably, for the CER journals, both sets of author guidelines mention framework use and both journals include a high proportion of articles using frameworks that aligned with Tiers 3 and 4. Thus, in the case of CER, the norms of the community appear to be well-aligned with the guidelines for authoring articles in both journals.

Common frameworks used in CER

Researchers generally operationalized the specific frameworks used in alignment with the goals of the broader categories to which the frameworks belong. For example, studies using conceptions-based or fine-grained constructivist theories sought to understand the nature of students’ content knowledge and conceptual learning ( e.g. , Bain et al. , 2018 ; Park et al. , 2020 ), and studies using the pedagogical content knowledge framework focused on how instructors enact or develop their knowledge for teaching ( e.g. , Akinyemi and Mavhunga, 2021 ). In both cases, the use of frameworks was consistent with the constructivist framework category and its focus on the nature, structure, and development of knowledge. In contrast, studies using phenomenology or other hermeneutic theories such as self-efficacy generally sought to characterise how students and teachers experience features of the learning process or environment ( e.g. , Willson-Conrad and Grunert Kowalske, 2018 ; Burrows et al. , 2021 ), reflecting the hermeneutic framework category and its attention to deriving meaning from individual experiences. Lastly, studies leveraging critical theories such as belonging and identity sought to investigate power structures that relate to inequities within teaching and learning in chemistry ( e.g. , Fink et al. , 2020 ), mirroring the critical theory framework category and its emphasis on social systems and the distribution of power. As discussed by Bodner and Orgill (2007) , specific frameworks lend themselves to particular study designs and are relevant for specific research topics, and researchers should select frameworks that align with the scope and research aims.

Conclusions

In addition to characterizing the presence of frameworks, our analysis also sought to identify how frameworks are used within individual articles published across DBER fields. For this analysis, we found that across all DBER disciplines, many studies presented a framework that was involved in the Data Analysis, informed the Findings, and was revisited in the Conclusions (Tiers 3 and 4), whereas a smaller subset of articles presented a framework that contextualized the study but was not discussed in relation to methodological decisions (Tiers 1 and 2). Most DBER journals had a higher fraction of articles that were categorized as Tier 4 in comparison to articles categorized as Tier 1 but there was variation (both across disciplines and within disciplines’ respective journals). Lastly, building on the correspondence between author guidelines and whether a framework is present for each disciplinary community ( Fig. 2 ), we observed a correspondence between author guidelines and the varied ways in which frameworks are used ( Fig. 3 ).

Lastly, we examined the common frameworks used within CER studies, which we grouped into four broad categories: constructivist frameworks, hermeneutic frameworks, critical theory frameworks, and frameworks related to the organization of chemistry knowledge. Articles mostly employed frameworks under the umbrella of constructivist frameworks, which included the subcategories of frameworks related to both social constructivism as well as learning and cognition. Our findings suggest that fewer studies use critical theory frameworks and (to a lesser extent) hermeneutic frameworks.

Implications

We argue it is necessary as a community to clarify and revisit expectations regarding the need to incorporate pertinent frameworks into research articles. Although authorship guidelines and recommendations suggested by editorials provide a great starting point for researchers to ensure their research and writing meets the standards of the respective journals, in communities such as CER, researchers continue to document and shape the norms of the field. Thus, it may be necessary to periodically reflect on author guidelines and consider whether they accurately reflect the current state of the field. We advocate for the importance of rethinking framework expectations given 27% of CER articles published in the last four years did not include a discussion of a guiding framework, indicating that it was not deemed necessary as it went through the journal review process. Stated differently, as a shared product of our community ( Ashwin, 2012 ), it was decided that in some cases the project design did not warrant the inclusion of a framework. The variation in alignment between the community norms of disciplines (as reflected by the peer-reviewed articles analyzed) and the expectations described in the author guidelines can be seen across our DBER sample. In fact, as the co-authors discussed our literature review, we reflected on whether we needed to incorporate a framework. As we brainstormed, one potential framework we considered was communities of practice ( Wenger, 1998 ). Literature related to communities of practice certainly informed our project by providing language to discuss this project and support our rationale; however, communities of practice did not explicitly inform the research process ( e.g. , data analysis). Rather than presenting a framework that did not track throughout different sections of the manuscript or forcing a framework ( e.g. , coding for constructs outlined in communities of practice like boundary objects or brokers, which would not add to our analysis), we chose to discuss the communities of practice literature without including it as an explicit “framework.” Importantly, whether a study needs a framework depends on the scope and goals of the study. For example, some investigations may not involve readily “theorizable” ideas, such as a study focusing on collecting data to inform future iterations of a course ( e.g. , through surveying student preferences related to in-person, hybrid, or online instruction). In contrast, other study designs, such as investigating students’ motivation to pursue a graduate program in chemistry, would be challenging without a framework. Motivation is a broad concept and there are multiple theories available with assumptions and definitions that could guide an investigation. As part of this, it is necessary to clarify whether the community holds the same expectations with respect to framework use for qualitative versus quantitative studies.

Furthermore, it is important to consider the ways frameworks can be used to support a study. Our analysis demonstrates that frameworks in CER articles often serve either as a picture “frame” ( i.e. , Tiers 1 and 2; the framework surrounds and contextualizes the study, and while it may influence the “big picture” narrative it could be removed without changing the specific findings of the research) or a house “frame” ( i.e. , Tiers 3 and 4; the framework provides a necessary structure and organizing scheme that is critical for the outcome of the research). Clarifying how frameworks inform and shape research is valuable both for increasing transparency about the research process while improving the ways emerging researchers and practitioners can identify connections between research findings and their own contexts.

We identified that constructivist frameworks are the most prevalent in our field, followed by a similar level of utilization for hermeneutic and organization of chemistry knowledge frameworks, and lastly an underutilization of critical theory frameworks. The distribution of framework usage suggests the current focus and values of our discipline and provides broader implications regarding the direction of future research within CER. In particular, recent calls for an increased focus on investigating diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in CER ( Winfield et al. , 2020 ; Ryu et al. , 2021 ) suggest a need to increase research using hermeneutic and critical frameworks, which are essential frameworks for social justice research ( Metcalf et al. , 2018 ). In general, the common usage of constructivist ( e.g. , personal and social) and organization of chemistry knowledge frameworks may indicate an unspoken post-positivist (or positivist) paradigm underlying many education research studies within the CER community, and it is necessary for researchers to engage in reflexivity regarding the traditional associations of positivist paradigms with privileging majority perspectives. We posit that research within the positivist paradigm can provide valuable contributions to our understanding of teaching and learning in chemistry, but that it is necessary to reflect on how research under these paradigms may lend itself to perpetuating structures that reinforce inequities. Hence, it is necessary for researchers to understand frameworks drawing from other paradigms and to recognize the value of approaching shared problems through the lenses of multiple paradigms and frameworks ( Treagust et al. , 2014 ).

In addition to contextualizing frameworks within their broader paradigms, it is important for researchers to reflect on the specific assumptions of frameworks and evaluate the validity of their application to chemistry. We noted that CER tends to borrow frameworks from other communities, as opposed to developing our own models that have explanatory and predictive power. Borrowing frameworks from other communities can be extremely productive, especially when investigating topics that align well with the goals of other communities ( Bain et al. , 2019 ); however, to continue to advance our community of practice, more work is needed in CER that uses data to develop chemistry-situated frameworks and theories, as well as work that critically evaluates the limitations of the frameworks we adapt from other research communities. Projects designed using a grounded theory approach are particularly well-suited to accomplish this goal ( Strauss and Corbin, 1990 ; Charmaz, 2006 ).

In the context of the larger discussion related to bridging the research/practice divide, we echo the concerns related to accessibility and practicality ( Rodriguez and Towns, 2019 ; Johnson, 2022 ; Sweeder et al. , 2023 ). In terms of accessibility, we provided a general overview of how frameworks are used within CER and other DBER fields, focusing on use rather than categorizing frameworks into the categories of theoretical, conceptual, analytical, or methodological frameworks which are somewhat interchangeably used across the CER community. Additionally, as a community, we must consider the extent to which a “framework requirement” could make our work less accessible by potentially creating barriers toward entry into our community of practice. We aim to make our review more practical by providing a resource for instructors regarding frameworks and how they can serve as helpful tools to structure classroom interventions. Specifically, Table 6 summarizes types of frameworks that are organized thematically. As part of this, we draw the readers’ attention toward the variety of potentially useful instructional design, pedagogical, and evaluation frameworks. These frameworks can be used to shape assessment and instructional choices in the way they clearly articulate the organization of chemistry knowledge and outline target competencies related to developing expert reasoning.

Lastly, as discussed previously, our DBER communities are connected not just by shared content and skills, but by the frameworks we use as part of the research process. Although it was beyond the scope of the current review to compare the specific frameworks used across the DBER articles, we note this as a potential area for future inquiry and discussion. For example, examining how disciplines may use different frameworks to describe the same construct ( e.g. , identity) or how disciplines may be using the same framework in different ways ( e.g. , knowledge-in-pieces) could serve as a useful area to begin a dialogue across communities. Comparatively, multiple communities using the same frameworks may indicate shared assumptions that can serve as bridges between communities and demonstrate the broad utility of a framework. Considering how different communities may be operationalizing theoretical constructs differently, with open conversations across communities, has the potential to advance our collective knowledge about STEM education more broadly.

Author contributions

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Research Trends in Technology-Enhanced Chemistry Learning: A Review of Comparative Research from 2010 to 2019

• Published: 09 January 2021
• Volume 30 , pages 496–510, ( 2021 )

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• Shu-Hao Wu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2586-5479 1 ,
• Chiu-Lin Lai 2 ,
• Gwo-Jen Hwang 3 , 4 &
• Chin-Chung Tsai 5  

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Chemistry is a subject which involves a number of abstract concepts, making it a difficult and frustrating learning process for many students. Educators and researchers believe that technology could provide an opportunity to address this problem. However, it is challenging to find a model for appropriately and successfully integrating technology into chemistry education. Therefore, in this study, a review was conducted on the technology-enhanced chemistry learning studies published in Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) journals from 2010 to 2019. This study searched the target articles from the Web of Science (WOS) database and excluded those studies that did not adopt a comparative research design. Finally, 60 studies were included in this research trend analysis. A coding scheme was developed for the types of technology, the types of learning tools, the roles of technology in chemistry learning, learning topics, learning environments, participants, research designs, and the learning outcomes the researchers evaluated. From the analysis results, it was found that (1) inorganic chemistry and physical chemistry courses were the main learning topics, while the formal classroom was most often referred to as the research setting. The most frequently discussed issue was students’ learning achievement. (2) Regarding technology integration, offering students learning content through personal computers was the main activity mode. The technology was used for lower-level implementation, that is, providing supplementary materials for students. (3) Finally, using keyword analysis, it is possible to extract the recent concerns of the researchers, and from the results of the study, it is clear that the researchers are placing increasing emphasis on learners’ experience and skill development in the learning process. Accordingly, this study highlights the features of the research trends and then provides suggestions for researchers in the technology-enhanced chemistry learning field.

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Conceptualization: Shu-Hao Wu, Chiu-Lin Lai; Methodology: Shu-Hao Wu, Chiu-Lin Lai, Gwo-Jen Hwang, Chin-Chung Tsai; Formal analysis and investigation: Shu-Hao Wu, Chiu-Lin Lai; Writing-original draft preparation: Shu-Hao Wu, Chiu-Lin Lai; Writing - review and editing: Gwo-Jen Hwang, Chin-Chung Tsai.

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Wu, SH., Lai, CL., Hwang, GJ. et al. Research Trends in Technology-Enhanced Chemistry Learning: A Review of Comparative Research from 2010 to 2019. J Sci Educ Technol 30 , 496–510 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-020-09894-w

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The Journal of Chemical Education   (JCE) is co-published by the ACS Division of Chemical Education and the American Chemical Society Publications division. Launched in 1924, JCE is the world’s premier chemical education journal. JCE is published online and in print and has electronic archival content available from 1924 (Vol. 1) to the present.

The Journal of Chemical Education publishes peer-reviewed articles and related information as a resource to those in the field of chemical education and to those institutions that serve them. The journal typically addresses chemical content, laboratory experiments, instructional methods, and pedagogies. JCE serves as a means of communication among people across the world who are interested in the teaching and learning of chemistry. The global audience includes instructors of chemistry from middle school through graduate school, professional staff who support these teaching activities, as well as some scientists in commerce, industry, and government.

The criteria for a publishable manuscript include these areas of evaluation: scholarship, novelty, pedagogy, utility, and presentation. To be considered for publication by the Journal of Chemical Education , a manuscript must:

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• Exhibit novelty through original scholarship or a creative or innovative practice.
• Have pedagogical content and educational relevance and insight that demonstrate a positive impact on teaching and learning while articulating audience level, use with students, and details for adopting and adapting the material, if applicable.
• Be useful to JCE readers by showing a connection to teaching and learning within the context of curricula or coursework.
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• Be submitted electronically using ACS Paragon Plus

JCE does not publish science research papers (or papers exclusively covering scientific content) unless they have a direct link to the teaching and learning of chemistry.

JCE publishes a wide variety of scholarly content categorized by manuscript type. All manuscripts must be designated as a particular type upon submission. Word counts associated with each manuscript type are a recommended word limit; these word counts exclude display elements, manuscript references, and Supporting Information, which is material published separately only online.

An Activity (3000 words) describes a hands-on activity at any level (from elementary through the university level) that can be done in the classroom or laboratory or in an informal setting. Activities are intended to introduce engaging and thought-provoking ideas or topics and to spark discussion. They need to have been done with students in a teaching or outreach setting and to have been evaluated and used several times in order to substantiate claims of success. They should not be proposals.

The ways in which the activity has been implemented in the context of a curriculum should be described. Details such as the total number of students who completed the activity, how long it took students to complete the activity, and whether they worked individually or in groups should be included, as should student results. The range of student results should be stated in addition to typical student results (an average value). Problems that instructors might encounter should be mentioned, and other information that would assist an instructor with implementing the activity should be provided. There should also be an assessment of how the activity improved the learning process of students. Any potential hazards and safety precautions must be addressed in a dedicated Hazards section in the manuscript.

Supporting Information to aid in the use of the activity by others is required—for example, notes for instructors (including sources for materials used) and actual student handouts. Materials used should be inexpensive, nonhazardous, and readily available.

Permissions and documentation are required in order to reproduce material created by students. (See Use of Student Work section.)

An Article (5000 words) describes a novel educational idea or approach, content for the classroom or laboratory, pedagogical advance, or educational research. Invited Articles may review a broad topic area that has wide applicability. Articles can target specific constituencies (i.e., precollege or introductory or advanced college students), address a specific content area, describe a new pedagogy or teaching method, or provide results on an innovation or chemical education research study.

Chemical Education Research

Articles specific to reporting the research pertaining to teaching and learning chemistry (chemical education research, CER) should be identified as such in the cover letter. CER manuscripts must be written and will be reviewed using the Specific Content Requirements for Chemical Education Research Manuscripts . Because of these requirements for CER manuscripts, the recommended word limit for this category of article is 7000.

Scholarly discussions of a topic of interest to the chemical education community that include the opinions of the author(s) are published using the manuscript type Commentary (2,000 words or as agreed to by the editorial office). The manuscript should provide sufficient information for readers to understand the topic or formulate their own opinions.

Communication

Communications (3000 words) generally update or extend topics addressed in manuscripts that have already been published. The ways in which the update is interesting, useful, and novel should be made clear. Manuscripts of this type are not intended as precursors to Articles. For Communications pertaining to laboratory experiments and activities, the focus should be on student experiences and student results with regard to the update. The details of the lab or activity must be included in the Supporting Information, as should materials that have been used with students.

Demonstration

A description, explanation, and procedure for an actual or virtual demonstration for teaching chemistry concepts, Demonstrations (3000 words) must reflect best practices related to safety (i.e., handling and storage of chemicals) and to hazards (i.e., fires, explosions, noxious fumes), as well as provide complete information that will enable others to use the demonstration in their settings. Hazards and safety precautions must be addressed in a dedicated Hazards section. Providing Supporting Information is required; including a video of the demonstration as Supporting Information is encouraged.

Editorials (1000 words) are opinion pieces by the Editor-in-Chief, an Associate Editor, or a guest writer invited by the Editor-in-Chief.

Laboratory Experiment

Laboratory Experiment (4000 words) manuscripts are intended to help readers visualize their students performing an experiment. Thus, labs are expected to have been done by students as part of an actual laboratory course or learning experience and to have been evaluated and used several times in order to substantiate claims of success. They should not be proposals. Labs should be novel and placed within the context of similar experiments that have been published. The pedagogical effectiveness of the reported experiment must be made clear.

Information about how the experiment was conducted with students should be provided, including the number of students who participated, whether the students worked individually or in groups, the number of times the experiment was run, and the time it took to complete the experiment. The focus should not be on procedures; rather, procedures should be summarized and details provided in the Supporting Information. Hazards and safety precautions must be addressed in a dedicated Hazards section in the manuscript.

There should also be an assessment of how the experiment improved the learning process of students and whether the pedagogical goals were achieved. Typical assessments include exam questions, pre- and postlab quizzes, assignments, and laboratory reports. If laboratory reports are used for assessment of achieving the pedagogical goals for an experiment, authors should state what specific information in the lab reports was used to assess achievement of each of the pedagogical goals, and how well students did on those aspects of the reports. Student surveys are not considered adequate tools. Limitations of the experiment (e.g., the use of expensive or uncommon equipment or professionally fabricated materials) should be noted as an indication of whether it can be used in certain settings.

Supporting Information must accompany the manuscript; it should contain material that a reader would find necessary to set up, adapt, and carry out the lab in a particular instructional environment. Materials such as student handouts, instructor notes, detailed procedures, safety information, CAS numbers, pre- and postlab assessments, and data (representative student data; “idealized” author data are optional) are particularly useful. Student handouts and instructor notes should be placed in separate files. It is appropriate to mention developmental work in instructor notes. An editable version of the Supporting Information (i.e., Word document) should be provided; this format is convenient for instructors who adapt or modify the lab.

For experiments involving recombinant DNA work, authors should consult their institutional biosafety committees (IBCs) for the biosafety level (i.e., BSL-1, BSL-2, BSL-3) of the work in the experiment; for student experiments it will probably be BSL-1, but authors should confirm this with the IBC and register the experiment with the committee. For experiments involving study subject animals, please see the ACS Ethical Guidelines .

Letter to the Editor

A manuscript type that allows readers to respond to a piece that has been published in JCE , Letter to the Editor (1000 words) should contribute to or elicit discussion on a subject without overstepping the bounds of professional courtesy. The author(s) of the publication referred to may be invited to submit a reply. Letter to the Editor will typically be peer-reviewed.

Technology Report

A Technology Report (3000 words) provides a scholarly description of a website, software application, media item, or other use of technology that enhances teaching and learning. The technology described should have been used with students and the results reported. The manuscript text describes the item and its intended use with students and provides the URL for Web-based resources, as appropriate. For all other applications described, the file related to the described technology should be included as Supporting Information for publication (e.g., Excel worksheet, Flash animation, specific application codes, scripts, Mathematica program file).

While this document will provide basic information on how to prepare and submit the manuscript as well as other critical information about publishing, we also encourage authors to visit the ACS Publishing Center for additional information on everything that is needed to prepare (and review) manuscripts for ACS journals and partner journals, such as

• Mastering the Art of Scientific Publication , which shares editor tips about a variety of topics including making your paper scientifically effective, preparing excellent graphics, and writing cover letters.
• Resources on how to prepare and submit a manuscript to ACS Paragon Plus, ACS Publications’ manuscript submission and peer review environment, including details on selecting the applicable Journal Publishing Agreement .
• Sharing your research with the public through the ACS Publications open access program.
• ACS Reviewer Lab , a free online course covering best practices for peer review and related ethical considerations. 
• ACS Author Lab , a free online course that empowers authors to prepare and submit strong manuscripts, avoiding errors that could lead to delays in the publication process.
• ACS Inclusivity Style Guide , a guide that helps researchers communicate in ways that recognize and respect diversity in all its forms.

Manuscript Preparation

All ACS journals and partner journals have simplified their formatting requirements in favor of a streamlined and standardized format for an initial manuscript submission. Read more about the requirements and the benefits these serves authors and reviewers here .

Manuscripts submitted for initial consideration must adhere to these standards:

• Submissions must be complete with clearly identified standard sections used to report original research, free of annotations or highlights, and include all numbered and labeled components.
• Figures, charts, tables, schemes, and equations should be embedded in the text at the point of relevance. Separate graphics can be supplied later at revision, if necessary.
• When required by a journal's structure or length limitations, manuscript templates should be used.
• References can be provided in any style, but they must be complete, including titles. For information about the required components of different reference types, please refer to the  ACS Style Quick Guide .
• Supporting Information must be submitted as a separate file(s).

The templates facilitate the peer review process by allowing authors to place artwork and tables close to the point where they are discussed within the text. Learn more about document templates here . 

General information on the preparation of manuscripts may also be found in the ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication .

See the list of Acceptable Software and appropriate File Designations to be sure your file types are compatible with ACS Paragon Plus. Information for manuscripts generated from TeX/LaTeX is also available.

A cover letter must accompany every manuscript submission. During the submission process, you may type it or paste it into the submission system, or you may attach it as a file.

A cover letter for the attention of the Editor-in-Chief describing the relevance of the submission and intended audience should be provided. Any previous manuscript identification numbers should be referenced, and any changes that have been made to the manuscript should be summarized in the cover letter.

The title should clearly and concisely reflect the emphasis and content of the manuscript and be accessible to a broad audience. The title should not contain esoteric terms, symbols, trademark names, institution names, abbreviations, or uncommon acronyms, and part or series numbers. Proscribed terms include “new”, “first”, and “green”. Indicate the audience and the setting if that is significant. A well- crafted title aids in successful information retrieval.

Author List

Include all those who made substantial contributions to the work and to the preparation of the manuscript. To facilitate indexing and retrieval and for unique identification of an author, use given (first) names, initials, and surnames (e.g., John R. Smith) or first initials, second names, and surnames (e.g., J. Robert Smith). Because all author names are automatically imported into the electronic Journal Publishing Agreement, all author names must be entered into ACS Paragon Plus. Do not use only initials with surnames (e.g., J. R. Smith), as this causes indexing and retrieval difficulties and interferes with unique identification of an author.

One author must be designated as the person to whom correspondence should be addressed, indicated by an asterisk after that author’s surname and inclusion of an e-mail address in the manuscript file. The corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that all authors have approved the manuscript before submission and for all subsequent revisions.

Note that all authors listed should have made significant and substantial intellectual contributions to the work. Students should not be listed as coauthors unless their authorship meets the criteria outlined in the ACS Ethical Guidelines : see section B(11) for further details. Students may be recognized in the Acknowledgments section for their contributions.

Author Affiliation

For each author, include an institutional affiliation (department or unit and address) where the work was done. If the present affiliation of an author differs from the one at which the work was done, the new affiliation and address should be given in an author information note at the end of the manuscript file. Authors should ensure that the information in their ACS Paragon Plus account is up to date.

Institution Identification

Many funders and institutions require that institutional affiliations are identified for all authors listed in the work being submitted. ACS facilitates this requirement by collecting institution information during manuscript submission under Step 2: Authors and Affiliations in ACS Paragon Plus.

The abstract (approximately 250 words or fewer) should summarize the important points made in the manuscript. Include the abstract text in the manuscript file. No cited literature or display elements should appear in the abstract. A well-written abstract aids in successful information retrieval and is the first aspect of a submission that will be reviewed.

Keyword Terms

Provide significant keywords to aid the reader in literature retrieval. Please consider the use of words different from those in the title to expand the discoverability of the article. The keywords are published immediately before the text, following the abstract. Note that the keyword term “Chemical Education Research” is reserved for manuscripts that are intended for review using the specific criteria for CER described online .

Manuscript content should adhere to the criteria for the manuscript type selected. The Journal expects that manuscripts will be written in literate, grammatically correct, scientific English; the absence of these qualities inhibits and detracts from the effectiveness of the review and evaluation process and may lead to substantial delays. An informal tone and overuse of first-person pronouns, especially used as adjectives or possessives (e.g., “my”, “mine”, “our”, “ours”) and second-person pronouns (e.g., “you”, “your”) should be avoided.

Text should be presented in one column with numbered pages, and organized using headings and subheadings (without numbers, references, or acronyms in the headings). Abbreviations and acronyms should be used sparingly and should be defined at their first occurrence. Other than headings, present the text in black.

Whenever possible, use systematic nomenclature as recommended by IUPAC for chemical compounds and SI units, including in table column headings. (See the IUPAC “color books” , which include nomenclature and terminology guides.) Present analyzed data in an accurate, complete, yet concise manner. Express results with indications of their reliability. This includes appropriate use of significant figures, as well as statistical parameters (e.g., standard deviation, p-values indicating statistical significance, and measures of effect size). Terms, variables, and symbols should be defined within the text (rather than in a list of abbreviations). The Journal does not publish appendices. Such material should be removed from the main text of the manuscript and uploaded as separate Supporting Information. Authors must emphasize any unexpected, new, and/or significant hazards or risks associated with the reported work. This information should be in a separate Hazards section.

Hazards and Safety Precautions

Any manuscript type should contain a Hazards section if it describes the use of or exposure to hazardous chemicals or the use of equipment or procedures that present health or safety risks. A Hazards section is required in Demonstration and Laboratory Experiment manuscript types and in Communication manuscripts if they pertain to these manuscript types. Hazards and safety precautions relating to the handling or use of chemicals or the manipulation of materials or equipment must be completely and clearly described in this section.

Authors describing laboratory procedures, activities, and demonstrations are urged to consult the following resources to determine the appropriate and accepted standards for chemical laboratory safety practice:

• Prudent Practices in the Laboratory: Handling and Management of Chemical Hazards, Updated Version ,  from the National Research Council details standards for chemical laboratory safety practice.
• The ACS Center for Lab Safety hosts many resources including a laboratory safety resource specifically written for secondary schools and one written specifically for academic institutions from two-year colleges through graduate school.
• Safety Guidelines for Chemical Demonstrations from the ACS Division of Chemical Education outlines current best practices with a checklist of key issues for demonstrators.

The Journal does not publish manuscripts that involve the use of domestic (i.e., kitchen) microwave ovens because such use is potentially hazardous and poses safety concerns. The Journal also does not publish manuscripts in which authors describe the use of or exposure to chemicals known to be toxic, such as n -hexane, benzene, and others, unless the author presents a convincing case that such use or exposure does not pose a risk to health and safety.

In manuscripts that discuss procedures in which products are formed, the author must provide hazard and safety information about these compounds, inasmuch as in some cases they may be more hazardous than the reactants. If the hazards of the products of a reaction are not known, the author should state the hazards or safety concerns that might be assumed.

Display elements (figures, tables, equations, schemes, boxes, charts, structures, and reactions) should be self-explanatory, that is, understandable independent of the text. They must be created using the appropriate tool (e.g., the table tool, equation editor for equations, ChemDraw for chemical structures), numbered sequentially by type using arabic numerals, and cited in the text discussion. Each multipart figure, scheme, or equation must be assembled into a single object, and lines should not be placed around the entire display element. Display elements may be resized during production; for further details about the graphics specifications for display elements, see Appendix 2: Preparing Graphics . Any references that are cited in a caption need to be clarified with a credit line; that is, the caption must make clear whether the graphic has been adapted or reproduced from another source or is original but based on material from another source (see Copyright and Permissions for more information). Display elements in the Supporting Information should be numbered sequentially and discretely from those in the manuscript.

Specifications for preparing graphics are detailed below.

Acknowledgments

Include acknowledgments of grant and other financial support, technical assistance, colleagues’ advice, and so on. Do not use professional titles or honorifics in this section. Persons other than the authors who are acknowledged for having created artwork should also provide documentation granting consent to use their work.

Supporting Information for Publication

Supporting Information (SI) is material (e.g., figures, raw data, movies, media files, lengthy tables, sample computer files, student handouts, details for setting up and performing an Activity, Demonstration, or Laboratory Experiment) separate from the manuscript that will be published only online. Supporting Information, including separate materials for instructors and students, is required for Activities, Demonstrations, and Laboratory Experiments, and is optional for other manuscript types. The Supporting Information should be original material produced by the authors for publication in JCE and not previously published elsewhere or duplicated in the manuscript. Only those materials that are most relevant to the submission should be included, and the Supporting Information must be discussed in the text. If presentations are included, they are subject to the same policies concerning copyright and permissions as is other content.

For supplementary material that is not formally submitted as Supporting Information but is hosted on an author’s website, a description of the material and the URL for the website should be included in a separate paragraph following the list of SI files. In addition, the URL may be provided by citing this material in the manuscript and including a corresponding reference in the References section.

See the Supporting Information section for additional details.

A thorough literature review should be conducted, and the submission should be placed within the context of previously published work, including that which has appeared in JCE . Citations and references should follow the publication style found in The ACS Style Guide . Titles are required for all works cited; please provide complete publication information, including an issue number where applicable, and a DOI. Unpublished work that has been cited should be uploaded for editorial review. Reference call-out numbers in the text should be superscripted sequential Arabic numerals. Journal names are abbreviated according to the Chemical Abstracts Service Source Index (CASSI). Page ranges for articles as well as book citations should also be provided. Rather than providing URLs in the main text of the manuscript, add a citation for each discrete URL and include it sequentially in the References section with an “accessed” statement: “(accessed [Month] 20XX).” References to resources only in a language other than English will be largely inaccessible to JCE readers; including sufficient references to English- language resources will benefit readers and increase the value of the manuscript.

Textual material that might otherwise constitute a footnote or endnote must be incorporated into the References section and presented using complete sentences.

This information is provided to the reviewers during the peer-review process (for Review Only) and is available to readers of the published work (for Publication). Supporting Information must be submitted at the same time as the manuscript. See the list of Acceptable Software by File Designation and confirm that your Supporting Information is viewable .

If the manuscript is accompanied by any supporting information files for publication, these files will be made available to readers. A brief, nonsentence description of the actual contents of each file, including the file type extension, is required. This description should be labeled Supporting Information and should appear before the Acknowledgement and Reference sections.  Examples of sufficient and insufficient descriptions are as follows:

Examples of sufficient descriptions: “Supporting Information: 1 H NMR spectra for all compounds (PDF)” or “Additional experimental details, materials, and methods, including photographs of experimental setup (DOC)”.

Examples of insufficient descriptions: “Supporting Information: Figures S1-S3” or “Additional figures as mentioned in the text”.

When including supporting information for review only, include copies of references that are unpublished or in-press. These files are available only to editors and reviewers.

All ACS journals strongly encourage authors to make the research data underlying their articles publicly available at the time of publication.

Research data is defined as materials and information used in the experiments that enable the validation of the conclusions drawn in the article, including primary data produced by the authors for the study being reported, secondary data reused or analyzed by the authors for the study, and any other materials necessary to reproduce or replicate the results.

The ACS Research Data Policy provides additional information on Data Availability Statements, Data Citation, and Data Repositories.

A well-written paper helps share your results most clearly. ACS Publications’ English Editing Service is designed to help scientists communicate their research effectively. Our subject-matter expert editors will edit your manuscript for grammar, spelling, and other language errors so your ideas are presented at their best.

The quality of illustrations in ACS journals and partner journals depends on the quality of the original files provided by the authors. Figures are not modified or enhanced by journal production staff. All graphics must be prepared and submitted in digital format.

Graphics should be inserted into the main body whenever possible. Please see Appendix 2 for additional information.

Any graphic (figure chart, scheme, or equation) that has appeared in an earlier publication should include a credit line citing the original source. Authors are responsible for obtaining written permission to re-use this material.

The impact of your research is not limited to what you can express with words. Tables and figures such as graphs, photographs, illustrations, diagrams, and other visuals can play a significant role in effectively communicating your findings. Our Artwork Editing and Graphical Abstract services generate publication-ready figures and Table of Contents (TOC) graphics that conform to your chosen journal’s specifications. For figures, this includes changes to file type, resolution, color space, font, scale, line weights, and layout (to improve readability and professional appearance). For TOC graphics, our illustrators can work with a rough sketch or concept or help extract the key findings of your manuscript directly for use as a visual summary of your paper.

Preparing for Submission

Manuscripts, graphics, supporting information, and required forms, as well as manuscript revisions, must all be submitted in digital format through ACS Paragon Plus , which requires an ACS ID to log in. Registering for an ACS ID is fast, free, and does not require an ACS membership. Please refer to Appendix 1 for additional information on preparing your submission

JCE considers for publication only original work that has not been previously published and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Material published jointly by the Journal and the Publications Division of the ACS is subject to the terms of the Journal Publishing Agreement, signed on behalf of all authors. Exceptions to this policy are described below.

Preprints, Theses, and Dissertations

JCE authors are allowed to deposit an initial draft of their manuscript in a preprint repository such as ChemRxiv , arXiv , or bioRxiv . Please note that any use of a preprint server needs to be disclosed in the cover letter during submission and, as appropriate, state how the manuscript has been adjusted/updated between deposition and submission. Upon publication in JCE , authors should add a link from the preprint to the published article via the Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Some preprint servers, including ChemRxiv and bioRxiv, add this link for authors automatically after publication. The ACS Publications policy on theses and dissertations is available online .

Proceedings of Conferences and Symposia

Publication of a preprint or extended abstract in an ACS division meeting preprint book, in either print or electronic format, does not preclude consideration of a manuscript for publication, provided that the manuscript includes significant new information and data beyond what was in the preprint or extended abstract. It is the author’s responsibility to provide the Editor with copies of any relevant preprint(s). The Editors will make the decision on the suitability of the paper for publication. Upon publication in JCE , authors are advised to add a link from the preprint to the published paper via the citation and Digital Object Identifier (DOI).

JCE will consider for publication a paper that has been posted on an electronic site available to the general public, provided that the site is the personal site of the author or that of a funding agency (i.e., government or non-profit foundation) and is not connected to a commercial site that holds copyright to the material. Authors must notify JCE at the time of submission if the material has been available on the Internet or equivalent electronic media.

Initial Processing

JCE editors initially evaluate each submitted manuscript to determine whether it should be sent for peer review based on its meeting publication requirements and adherence to the stated criteria for its Manuscript Type. Submissions that do not comply with protocols will be returned to authors (or “unsubmitted”).

The Journal does not conduct preassessments prior to formal submission, nor are presubmission inquiries regarding proposals considered outside the ACS Paragon Plus environment. The JCE Editorial Office is unable to provide information pertaining to analytics. Authors can track statistics pertaining to their own articles in the ACS Publishing Center .

Using Material from Other Sources

The American Chemical Society has strict policies regarding the use of material from other sources. Permissions are not needed for material that the author produced or that is copyrighted by ACS. Authors must obtain permissions from copyright holders to use figures, illustrations, or photographs from other sources that appear in the author’s manuscript and Supporting Information, even if the author produced the content originally. Documentation must be uploaded into ACS Paragon Plus before a manuscript can be sent to reviewers. See the Copyright and Permissions section for additional information.

Appropriate Material

The following material is suggested for use:

• Photographs, illustrations, and figures created by the authors. Model releases  must be signed by people who are identifiable in photographs, including authors.
• Figures for which ACS owns the copyright and that have been published previously in an ACS journal. Citations and credit lines are needed.
• Work for which formal permission has been obtained (including student work; see the Use of Student Work section). Authors must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Credit lines are needed.

Inappropriate Material

The following material is inappropriate:

• Logos (including commercial and institutional logos, logos on spectra, and logos shown on instrumentation in photographs). These images should be obscured by blurring, cropping, or masking.
• Trademarked product names or brand names (whether in images or in the text). These names should be replaced by generic names wherever possible.
• Stock photography, clip art, and cartoons (even if the images have been paid for).
• Images of currency (paper or coins), postage stamps, or flags from any country.
• Screenshots (or “captures”) from software companies, unless permission has been obtained from the software producer (including those that provide freely available material). Interfaces are considered to be proprietary. Permission also is required for screenshots showing ACS content and content from YouTube and similar Web entities. Note that screenshots cannot show logos, brand names, or other content that has been copyrighted elsewhere.
• Material from Wikipedia, Flickr, or similar websites.
• Creative Commons content. Creative Commons licenses should be carefully scrutinized. Some versions of the license permit the use of material for commercial purposes; others do not. Use of material in ACS journals is considered commercial because ACS sells subscriptions (“educational” use does not qualify). It is the responsibility of authors to carefully review the provisions of Creative Commons licenses, to follow any stipulations of the license, and to provide documentation to the journal's editorial office summarizing the license provisions and the ways in which the requirements have been met (in a letter, for example).
• Material from the Internet (unless produced by the author). Images pulled from the Internet cannot be used without permission from the original source, even if the source is cited.
• Art of unknown provenance that cannot be attributed to a specific source, especially that which has appeared in “old” publications.
• YouTube videos not created by the authors. Links may be included rather than providing videos.

Use of Student Work

If examples of student work (including anonymous work) are provided in the manuscript or the Supporting Information, documentation indicating that students have granted their consent should be uploaded along with the submission files. Documentation may include institutional review board (IRB) forms or permission statements from the students themselves. Full student names should not appear in the manuscript or Supporting Information.

Requests to reproduce content published in JCE are handled via the RightsLink permission system.

Peer Review

Those manuscripts that meet the initial requirements are assigned to an Associate Editor (AE). The AE sends the manuscript to reviewers for them to evaluate according to the following criteria:

• Scholarship (scientific and scholarly rigor)
• Novelty (originality, innovation, creativity)
• Pedagogy (educational relevance, insight)
• Utility (usefulness to readers, rationale)
• Presentation (organization, comprehensiveness, readability)

Reviewers may recommend “publish as is”, “minor revision”, “major revision”, or “do not publish”. After the reviewers have submitted their comments and suggestions, the AE evaluates their arguments and recommendations and makes a decision whether to approve, request a minor or major revision, or reject the manuscript. The AE adjudicates based on the reviewer comments; however, the reviews are not to be considered “votes”, and the review process is not one of “majority rules”. Very few manuscripts are published as originally submitted; nearly all are recommended for revision and are improved in response to reviewer suggestions before being accepted and published.

Because of the many submissions the Journal receives—and because manuscripts are unique and require varying levels of attention—definitive processing times cannot be guaranteed. Authors are notified once their manuscripts proceed to the next stage.

Types of Decisions

Decision types include revision, reject and resubmit, reject, and accept. Decisions are based on reviews and assessments made by the JCE Editorial Office. All resubmissions and revisions must be formally processed via the ACS Paragon Plus environment.

The Editor-in-Chief (EIC) or AE may request a minor or major revision at any point during the peer- review process. The revised manuscript must be accompanied by a cover letter that acknowledges the revision as well as a separate author response document that contains a detailed, itemized list of changes made to the manuscript and reasons why a reviewer’s suggestion or concern does not merit a change. Reiterate reviewer comments and follow each with a response. In this way, the editors can refer to a single document rather than having to revisit separate documents. The author’s response may also be entered or pasted into a text box provided by ACS Paragon Plus for this purpose. Ensure that the latest files have been uploaded and that there are no extraneous files. Files showing changes may be uploaded for review purposes. However, “clean” files should be provided. If the track changes feature in Word has been used, ensure for the manuscript file and Supporting Information file(s) that all changes have been accepted and comments resolved, and that the track changes feature has been turned off.

Reject and Resubmit

The EIC or AE may reject a submission with editorial or external peer review, yet invite a revision based on the merit of the submission. Typically, the decision letter will contain a list of suggested improvements. A thorough cover letter and a document containing itemized responses to reviewer comments must accompany the resubmission. Previous manuscript identification numbers should be referenced, and the changes that have been made to the manuscript should be clearly stated in the cover letter. The revised manuscript will be handled as a new submission and will be given a new receipt date.

The EIC or AE may reject a manuscript based on either editorial or external peer review at any point during the peer-review process after determining that the submission is not within the scope or objectives of the Journal. If there is no invitation to resubmit, permission from the AE should first be sought before resubmitting a previously rejected manuscript. Previous manuscript identification numbers should be referenced, and the changes that have been made to the manuscript should be clearly stated in the cover letter.

When the EIC or AE is satisfied with the submission, it is formally accepted, and the files are forwarded to ACS for production and publication. ACS contacts authors regarding page proofs, which should be reviewed carefully. After page proofs are approved, the manuscript will be published online as an Article ASAP available through the ACS website. Once a manuscript appears on the Web it is considered published. Any change to the manuscript will need to be submitted to the JCE Editorial Office as an Addition and Correction.

When submitting their manuscripts to ACS Paragon Plus, authors may suggest reviewers and are encouraged to provide the names, affiliations, e-mail addresses, and a few words explaining their qualifications to review the manuscript. These reviewers’ names will be added to the unranked list of suggested reviewers for the submission. Editors may choose to invite any, all, or none of the suggested reviewers to evaluate the submission. Including suggested reviewers assists the Journal in expanding its reviewer pool. Authors are encouraged to avoid suggesting reviewers from the authors’ institutions. Do not suggest reviewers who may have a real or perceived conflict of interest . Whenever possible, suggest academic email addresses rather than personal email addresses.

If your submission is declined for publication by this journal, the editors might deem your work to be better suited for another ACS Publications journal or partner journal and suggest that the authors consider transferring the submission. Manuscript Transfer simplifies and shortens the process of submitting to another ACS journal or partner journal, as all the coauthors, suggested reviewers, manuscript files, and responses to submission questions are copied by ACS Paragon Plus to the new draft submission. Authors are free to accept or decline the transfer offer.

Note that each journal is editorially independent. Transferring a manuscript is not a guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted, as the final publication decision will belong to the editor of the next journal.

PRODUCTION AND PUBLICATION

Correction of the galley proofs is the responsibility of the Corresponding Author. The Corresponding Author of an accepted manuscript will receive e-mail notification and complete instructions when page proofs are available for review via ACS Direct Correct . Extensive or important changes on page proofs, including changes to the title or list of authors, are subject to review by the editor.

It is the responsibility of the Corresponding Author to ensure that all authors listed on the manuscript agree with the changes made on the proofs. Galley proofs should be returned within 48 hours in order to ensure timely publication of the manuscript.

Accepted manuscripts will be published on the ACS Publications Web site as soon as page proofs are corrected and all author concerns are resolved. The first date on which the document is published on the Web is considered the publication date.

Publication of manuscripts on the Web may occur weeks in advance of the cover date of the issue of publication. Authors should take this into account when planning their patent and intellectual property activities related to a document and should ensure that all patent information is available at the time of first publication, whether ASAP or issue publication.

All articles published ahead of print receive a unique Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, which is used to cite the manuscript before and after the paper appears in an issue.

Manuscripts will be published on the “ASAP Articles” page on the web as soon as page proofs are corrected and all author concerns are resolved. ASAP publication usually occurs within a few working days of receipt of page proof corrections, which can be several weeks in advance of the cover date of the issue.

The American Chemical Society follows guidance from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) when considering any ethical concerns regarding a published article, Retractions, and Expressions of Concern.

Additions and Corrections

Additions and Corrections may be requested by the author(s) or initiated by the Editor to address important issues or correct errors and omissions of consequence that arise after publication of an article. All Additions and Corrections are subject to approval by the Editor, and should bring new and directly relevant information and corrections that fix scientific facts. Minor corrections and additions will not be published. Readers who detect errors of consequence in the work of others should contact the corresponding author of that work.

Additions and Corrections must be submitted as new manuscripts via ACS Paragon Plus by the Corresponding Author for publication in the “Addition/Correction” section of the Journal. The corresponding author should obtain approval from all coauthors prior to submitting or provide evidence that such approval has been solicited. The manuscript should include the original article title and author list, citation including DOI, and details of the correction.

Retractions

Articles may be retracted for scientific or ethical reasons and may be requested by the article author(s) or by the journal Editor(s), but are ultimately published at the discretion of the Editor. Articles that contain seriously flawed or erroneous data such that their findings and conclusions cannot be relied upon may be retracted in order to correct the scientific record. When an article is retracted, a notice of Retraction will be published containing information about the reason for the Retraction. The originally published article will remain online except in extraordinary circumstances (e.g. where deemed legally necessary, or if the availability of the published content poses public health risks).

Expressions of Concern

Expressions of Concern may be issued at the discretion of the Editor if:

• there is inconclusive evidence of research or publication misconduct by the authors;
• there is evidence that the findings are unreliable but the authors’ institution will not investigate the case;
• an investigation into alleged misconduct related to the publication either has not been, or would not be, fair and impartial or conclusive;
• an investigation is underway but a judgment will not be available for a considerable time.

Upon completion of any related investigation, and when a final determination is made about the outcome of the article, the Expression of Concern may be replaced with a Retraction notice or Correction.

At ACS Publications, we know it is important for you to be able to share your peer reviewed, published work with colleagues in the global community of scientists. As sharing on sites known as scholarly collaboration networks (SCNs) is becoming increasingly prevalent in today’s scholarly research ecosystem, we would like to remind you of the many ways in which you, a valued ACS author, can share your published work .

Publishing open access makes it easy to share your work with friends, colleagues, and family members. In addition, ACS Publications makes it easy to share your newly published research with ACS Articles on Request (see below). Don’t forget to promote your research and related data on social media, at conferences, and through scholarly communication networks. Increase the impact of your research using the following resources: Altmetrics , Figshare , ACS Certified Deposit

When your article is published in an ACS journal or partner journal, corresponding authors are provided with a link that offers up to 50 free digital prints of the final published work. This link is valid for the first 12 months following online publication, and can be shared via email or an author’s website. After one year, the access restrictions to your article will be lifted, and you can share the Articles on Request URL on social media and other channels. To access all your Articles on Request links, log in to your ACS Publishing Center account and visit the “My Published Manuscripts” page.

Article , journal , and commercial reprints are available to order.

Appendix 1: PREPARING FOR SUBMISSION

We’ve developed ACS’ publishing and editorial policies in consultation with the research communities that we serve, including authors and librarians. Browse our policies below to learn more.

Ethical Guidelines

ACS editors have provided Ethical Guidelines for persons engaged in the publication of chemical research—specifically, for editors, authors, and reviewers. Each journal also has a specific policy on prior publication .

OFAC Compliance

As a U.S.-based non-profit organization, the American Chemical Society (ACS) is required to comply with U.S. sanctions laws and regulations administered by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). While these laws and regulations permit U.S.-based publishers like ACS to engage in publishing-related activities with authors located in sanctioned regions in many cases, ACS may be prohibited under U.S. law from engaging in publishing-related activities in some cases, including, but not limited to, instances where an author or the institution with which an author is affiliated is located in a particular sanctioned region or has been designated by OFAC as a Specially Designated National (SDN) pursuant to certain U.S. sanctions programs. ACS reserves the right to refrain from engaging in any publishing-related activities that ACS determines in its sole discretion may be in violation of U.S. law.

Safety Considerations

Authors must emphasize any unexpected, new, and/or significant hazards or risks associated with the reported work. This information should be in the Experimental Section of a full article and included in the main text of a letter. Statement examples can be found in the Safety Statement Style Sheet  and additional information on communicating safety information from the  ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication is freely available here .

Conflict of Interest Disclosure

A statement describing any financial conflicts of interest or lack thereof is published in each ACS journal and partner journal article.

During the submission process, the Corresponding Author must provide a statement on behalf of all authors of the manuscript, describing all potential sources of bias, including affiliations, funding sources, and financial or management relationships, that may constitute conflicts of interest. If the manuscript is accepted, the statement will be published in the final article.

If the manuscript is accepted and no conflict of interest has been declared, the following statement will be published in the final article: “The authors declare no competing financial interest.”

In publishing only original research, ACS is committed to deterring plagiarism, including self-plagiarism. ACS Publications uses CrossCheck's iThenticate software to screen submitted manuscripts for similarity to published material. Note that your manuscript may be screened during the submission process.

Further information about plagiarism can be found in Part B of the Ethical Guidelines to Publication of Chemical Research . See also the press release regarding ACS' participation in the CrossCheck initiative.

Authorship, Author List, and Coauthor Notification

Authors are required to obtain the consent of all their coauthors prior to submitting a manuscript. The submitting author accepts the responsibility of notifying all coauthors that the manuscript is being submitted.

During manuscript submission, the submitting author must provide contact information (full name, email address, institutional affiliation, and mailing address) for all of the coauthors. Because all of the author names are automatically imported into the electronic Journal Publishing Agreement , the names must be entered into ACS Paragon Plus. (Note that coauthors are not required to register in ACS Paragon Plus.) Author affiliation should reflect where the work was completed, even if the author has since left that institution. Authors may include a note with a current address if their institution has changed since the work was completed.

To expedite the processing of your manuscript, please format your author and affiliation information according the guidelines in this link: https://pubsapp.acs.org/paragonplus/submission/author-address-information.pdf .

Criteria for authorship can be found in Part B of the Ethical Guidelines to Publication of Chemical Research . Artificial intelligence (AI) tools do not qualify for authorship. The use of AI tools for text or image generation should be disclosed in the manuscript within the Acknowledgment section with a description of when and how the tools were used. For more substantial use cases or descriptions of AI tool use, authors should provide full details within the Methods or other appropriate section of the manuscript.

If any change in authorship is necessary after a manuscript has been submitted, confirmation is required that all of the authors (including those being added or removed) have been notified and have agreed to the change. To provide this confirmation, authors are asked to complete and sign an authorship change form and provide the completed form to the appropriate editorial office.

Authors with a single name:  If you, or any of your coauthors, have only one name, please follow these steps for proper submission to ACS Paragon Plus:

• First (Given) Name Field: Enter an asterisk (*) into the "First (Given) Name" field.
• Last (Family) Name Field: Enter your single name into the "Last (Family) Name" field.

If your paper is accepted, the asterisk (*) will be removed from the published version of the paper.

Patent Activities and Intellectual Property

Authors are responsible for ensuring that all patent activities and intellectual property issues are satisfactorily resolved prior to first publication (ASAP or in issue). Acceptance and publication will not be delayed for pending or unresolved issues of this nature.

Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID)

Authors submitting manuscript revisions are required to provide their own personal, validated ORCID iD before completing the submission, if an ORCID iD is not already associated with their ACS Paragon Plus user profiles. This ID may be provided during original manuscript submission or when submitting the manuscript revision. All authors are strongly encouraged to register for an ORCID iD, a unique researcher identifier. The ORCID iD will be displayed in the published article for any author on a manuscript who has a validated ORCID iD associated with ACS when the manuscript is accepted.

ORCID iDs should not be typed into the manuscript. ACS publishes only those ORCID iDs that have been properly verified and linked before the manuscript is accepted . After your ORCID iD is linked, it will be displayed automatically in all subsequently accepted manuscripts for any/all ACS journals. We do not publish ORCID iDs provided during proof review or via other communications after a manuscript is accepted for publication.

With an ORCID iD, you can create a profile of your research activities to distinguish yourself from other researchers with similar names, and make it easier for your colleagues to find your publications. If you do not yet have an ORCID iD, or you wish to associate your existing ORCID iD with your ACS Paragon Plus account, you may do so by clicking on “Edit Your Profile” from your ACS Paragon Plus account homepage and following the ORCID-related links. Learn more at www.orcid.org .

Copyright and Permissions

To obtain forms and guidelines for completing the Journal Publishing Agreement or obtaining permissions from copyright owners, and to explore a Copyright Learning Module for chemists, click here .

Funder Reporting Requirement

Authors are required to report funding sources and grant/award numbers. Enter ALL sources of funding for ALL authors in BOTH the Funder Registry Tool in ACS Paragon Plus and in your manuscript to meet this requirement.

Open Access Compliance

ACS offers options by which authors can fulfill the requirements for open access and deposition into repositories for funded research. Visit our ACS Open Science site to see how to fulfill requirements for specific funders  and to find out if you are eligible to publish under a Read + Publish agreement between ACS and your institution. You can also find out more about Open Access Compliance and ACS Open Science initiatives .

Diversity and Inclusion Statement

During manuscript submission, ACS journal authors have the option to submit a statement sharing information related to diversity and inclusion that is relevant for their paper. If supplying a diversity and inclusion statement, the corresponding author must provide this on behalf of all authors of the manuscript during the submission process. These statements include but are not limited to analysis of citation diversity and acknowledgment of indigenous land on which research was conducted. Statements expressing political beliefs are not permitted and may be removed by the journal office. All statements are subject to final review by the Editor.

• Citation Diversity Statement: The citation diversity statement should appear in the Acknowledgements section of the manuscript. ACS recommends including the following: (1) the importance of citation diversity, (2) the proportion of citations by gender and race/ethnicity for the first and last authors, (3) the method used to determine those proportions and its limitations, and (4) steps taken to by the authors to improve citation diversity in the article. We recognize that one limitation of the current methods is that it cannot account for intersex, non-binary, and transgender people, or Indigenous and mixed-race authors. (Adapted from BMES/Springer Guidelines )
• Land acknowledgment: The land acknowledgment statement should appear in the Acknowledgements section of the manuscript. The statement should link to the institutions’ formal land acknowledgments on which the research took place, if possible. Further guidance for creating these statements can be found here: https://nativegov.org/news/a-guide-to-indigenous-land-acknowledgment/ .

Appendix 2: Preparing Graphics

Digital graphics pasted into manuscripts should have the following minimum resolutions:

• Black and white line art, 1200 dpi
• Grayscale art, 600 dpi
• Color art, 300 dpi

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Class of 2024: Brandon Tapia is engineering a greener future

• Hailey Wade

19 Apr 2024

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Hometown: Herndon, Virginia 

College: College of Engineering

Major/ minor: Chemical engineering major, with minors in green engineering and chemistry

Favorite Hokie memory: “I have to say my first Virginia Tech football game. My freshman year was during the pandemic, so we couldn’t go to games then, but during sophomore year the first game was against UNC and we won. I’ll never forget it.”

Plans after graduation: Attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to pursue his Ph.D. in chemical engineering

Up for the challenge

Whether he’s tackling chemical engineering classes or big climate change issues happening in the world today, Brandon Tapia enjoys a challenge. He was drawn to chemical engineering for that exact reason; the promise that he would be challenged to solve big problems that have global impact.

Coming from a small high school, Tapia chose Virginia Tech because of the top ranked programs and endless opportunities available to students. 

“I had a fantastic high school experience, but I found myself wishing I had access to a more STEM-focused curriculum,” Tapia said. “I love that I had this opportunity during my four years at Virginia Tech, and my interdisciplinary work has flourished because of it.”

For Tapia, being a chemical engineer runs in the family. His dad is a chemical engineer, so he was exposed to the field at a young age. This early knowledge fueled his desire to learn more about environmental impacts and acknowledge opportunities to develop green transitions. 

Researching green energy 

Tapia came to Virginia Tech knowing that he wanted to specialize in green energy. His research focuses on improving environmental separations, particularly direct air carbon capture to remove atmospheric CO₂.

He credits his interest in environmental separations to Stephen Martin , associate professor in chemical engineering and the W.S. Pete White Chair for Innovation in Engineering Education . 

"He has a natural aptitude for research, demonstrating both the creativity and tenacity needed to be successful in the lab," said Martin. 

Tapia has spent the last few years working in Martin’s lab as an undergraduate research assistant, researching advanced materials for energy-efficient separations. 

“Dr. Martin was the professor of Mass and Energy Balances, my first chemical engineering course, and I really enjoyed his teaching style,” Tapia said. “I felt he had a good understanding of the students and how to promote our thinking, so I wanted to join his lab and work with him on environmental separations. Working in his lab really solidified my research focus and he’s been one of my biggest mentors throughout the course of my college career.”

With carbon dioxide emissions being the largest contributor to climate change, Tapia knew he wanted to get involved in the significant efforts that are being made to capture carbon before it can escape into the atmosphere.

“Unfortunately, the amount of CO₂ we have in the atmosphere is already too high,” Tapia said. “My research focuses on developing novel materials that capture CO₂ directly from the air we are breathing right now.”

Guiding the next generation

Tapia and Martin have also gotten the opportunity to work together outside of the lab.

Tapia has been a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AICHE) Student Chapter at Virginia Tech for several years, and Martin is the faculty advisor. Most recently, Tapia has taken on the role of AICHE tutoring chair. He oversees the entire program, which helps tutor over 200 students per year, while also tutoring around 10 students himself every week.

"It has been a pleasure to interact with him during his undergraduate chemical engineering career," Martin said. "He is an outstanding teacher and mentor, both in the lab, and as the leader of the AICHE tutoring program."

Tapia’s goal is to help chemical engineering students address some of the potential stressors they may face in an environment where they can feel comfortable getting help from peers.

“These tutoring sessions were created to help students progress academically,” Tapia said. “But they have developed into judgment-free, multi-participant discussions that foster an environment where students feel comfortable not only working with others to answer homework questions, but also to find guidance.” 

Tapia knows a thing or two about the importance of mentors while navigating college. In addition to Martin being a significant mentor throughout his time at Virginia Tech, Tapia also credits his resident advisor (RA) from freshman year for his desire to be a positive influence in other students’ lives. He went on to serve as an RA in Hoge Hall for two years, where he made a conscious effort to create a positive environment for all students.

“I had such a great experience as a freshman living in a Living-Learning Community (LLC) ,” Tapia said. “I wanted to provide the same support to other students that my RA gave me.”

Peer mentors have also been very influential in Tapia’s college experience. He has thrived on the support from not only faculty, but other students in chemical engineering.

“I came into the department thinking that it was going to be competitive, but I found it to be very family-oriented,” Tapia said. “I have really bonded with the students and faculty.”

Continuing his impact

The next stop for Tapia is MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering as a Ph.D. student in the fall. He spent last summer working as a visiting researcher at MIT, where he developed computational methods for predicting material properties. 

“I’m excited for this next step in my education because Virginia Tech has provided me with the skills to succeed in research and in my interpersonal relationships,” said Tapia. “The past four years, I have been dedicated to enhancing Virginia Tech's mission of supporting diversity and inclusivity and I plan to continue this work while addressing the challenges of global warming that so predominantly affect marginalized groups.” 

As Tapia joins MIT, he is excited to continue exploring problems in ways that people haven’t looked at before. 

“A lot of important science goes unnoticed because it's not reaching the correct people, or many people at all,” said Tapia. “I'm passionate about making research available and accessible, whether that be through open source programming or open access journals, to benefit society by raising awareness about the innovations that solve global challenges.”

Chelsea Seeber

540-231-2108

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• Published: 08 February 2024

Rethinking chemical engineering education

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• Venkat Venkatasubramanian 4 ,
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School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China

Jinlong Gong

Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

David C. Shallcross

School of Chemical Engineering, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Department of Chemical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

Venkat Venkatasubramanian

Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Minnesota Duluth, Duluth, MN, USA

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US Designates PFAS Chemicals as Superfund Hazardous Substances

FILE PHOTO: Signage is seen at the headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 10, 2021. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly/File Photo

By Clark Mindock

(Reuters) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Friday designated a pair of widely used industrial chemicals as hazardous substances under the country's Superfund program, accelerating a crackdown on toxic compounds known as "forever chemicals."

The rule will require companies to report leaks of two of the most commonly used per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, and help pay to clean up existing contamination.

The EPA last week announced its first drinking water standards to guard against PFAS pollution.

PFAS are a family of thousands of chemicals used in consumer and commercial products like firefighting foams, nonstick pans and stain resistant fabrics. They have been linked to cancer and other health concerns, and are often called forever chemicals because they do not easily break down in the human body or the environment.

The new rule targets contamination from two PFAS known as PFOA and PFOS. It does not ban the chemicals.

The Superfund designations will ensure that those responsible "pay for the costs to clean up pollution threatening the health of communities," EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement.

The Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act, known as the Superfund law, allows the EPA and state regulators to undertake or order remediation of hazardous sites and seek reimbursement from site owners, hazardous waste generators, waste transporters and others.

The EPA said on Friday it would prioritize enforcement against significant contributors to the release of PFAS, such as federal facilities and manufacturers.

The American Chemistry Council, a leading industry trade association, called the rule "severely flawed" on Friday and said the chemicals have not been produced in the United States in nearly a decade.

The Superfund program "is an expensive, ineffective and unworkable means to achieve remediation for these chemicals," the group said in a statement.

Environmental groups praised the EPA's move.

"These designations will give PFAS-contaminated sites the attention they deserve," Earthjustice attorney Jonathan Kalmuss-Katz said in a statement.

The new rule, one of the most aggressive moves yet by the Biden administration to regulate PFAS, also makes public funds available for remediation.

The regulation could spur additional litigation over liability for PFAS cleanup efforts.

Lawsuits filed by public water systems and others accusing major chemical companies of polluting U.S. drinking water with PFAS chemicals led to more than $11 billion in settlements last year.

(Reporting by Clark Mindock; Editing by David Bario, Jamie Freed and Richard Chang)

Copyright 2024 Thomson Reuters .

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China's commerce ministry on Thursday said it firmly objects to the U.S. raising tariffs and will take all necessary measures to protect its rights and interests.

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