Chemistry Education is a broad and exciting field, and projects can range from something close to practice (create a new lab practical, evaluate an outreach programme) all the way through to social sciences studies (Why do women get higher lab scores? How do students experience the summer vacation?). This blog post intends to support projects closer to the social sciences end of this spectrum.

Doing rigorous ChemEd work is hard! This blog collates some of the resources I have found most useful for supervising MChem projects. For books, I’ve given links to the Amazon.com listing for the convenience of finding ISBN codes etc; I strongly suggest you use your library rather than buying things.

Writing

On Writing Well by William Zinsser is probably the most important single thing you should read. It’s a lively text which gives an un-fussy tour of the core principles of writing well. Consider reading it more than twice.

MChem projects are not usually marked on how the research went (lots of research fails, so marking on successfulness would be unfair). Instead, the marking is based on how you write up your project. This means that writing is the core skill in an MChem project -- invest time in becoming good at it.

Literature Searching

The best single resource on literature searching is Seery’s blog post here.

I am a fan of date-restricted google scholar searches, but ERIC is an extraordinarily useful database which most people haven’t heard of. It is also worth searching the two leading ChemEd journals -- CERP and JChemEd -- through their websites.

You should master ‘reverse searching’ as quickly as possible. This lets you find out which papers have cited a paper. If your topic has a central paper or author, this can let you discover the relevant literature extremely quickly.

You should search for reviews in and around your topic as an immediate priority. It is often really hard to work out what the general landscape of literature around your topic is, and reviews are excellent for setting up context in a coherent way. They are also useful for working out what search terms will let you discover the relevant literature. Finding the right language can be hard: I supervised a project on revising for exams which was not helped by the use of the term ‘revision’ to mean ‘making edits to a piece of writing’ in the literature.

Most MChem projects open with a literature review. The very best reviews -- Flaherty’s discussion of the affective domain is a superb recent example -- try to build a new synthesis of the existing literature. Flaherty’s critical discussion of how the field’s qualitative research is underdeveloped is a particularly effective execution of a technique called ‘painting the gap’.

Research Questions

Seery’s editorial on research questions should be printed out and taped to the wall above your desk. Writing research questions deliberately is something which feels quite awkward at first, but is essential to understanding the results you gather and also the limitations of your work.

Depending on the nature of the project, it might be that the research questions have already been written. You still need to understand how the questions have been constructed. Specifically, you need to understand how educational theories have been used to write the questions. 

Ethics

The central theme of ethical requirements is to demonstrate respect for your research participants and readers. Rigour is respectful; transparency is respectful; data security is respectful; informed consent is respectful.

Erasing identities (e.g. trans and non-binary gender identities) is not respectful. You are free to hold your own views on identity, but professional ethics requires that you demonstrate respect to those who hold them (e.g. through survey options which allow non-binary students to participate). 

You should engage closely with the specific details of your institution’s policies, and attend all relevant mandated training (including GDPR training). These sessions can be mind-numbing; try to keep hold of the central idea of respect as you do them.

Sometimes things go wrong in research, and you should not try to hide mistakes from the ethics panel. A mistake I made was to offer a prize draw for survey participation, which excludes Islamic students (as prize draws break the religious prohibition on gambling). I declared it to the panel and we sorted it out (changed the prize draw to an ‘opt in’ format).

Talk with your supervisor if something goes wrong ethically. Once you discover an issue, the focus is normally on protecting participants and finding a constructive way forward (rather than punishing you!). 

A broad question about research ethics is something I would ask in every ChemEd viva. My favourite way of expressing this at the moment is “What were the biggest ethical risks in this research project?”

Qualitative Research

Successful Qualitative Research: A Practical Guide for Beginners by Braun & Clarke is a clear and self-consistent model with a rich range of stimulating examples from the authors’ own projects. Whether you choose this approach or another, you should try to remain aware that all qualitative methodologies are contested; Braun & Clarke take a fairly dim view of procedures like inter-rater reliability, for example. 

I feel that the approach in Braun & Clarke is particularly suitable for MChem projects because it embraces the identity of the researcher as an integral piece of the research; the student-and-researcher situation of an MChem student makes such a framework both convenient and valuable.

Collins & Stockton present a good discussion of how theories are particularly central to qualitative work. The best qualitative research often has a creative and sustained conversation between data and theory. This is often something which students really struggle to grasp, possibly because chemistry is taught in a way which does not always emphasise the distinction between theory and phenomenon strongly.

The classic viva methodology question is some variant of “isn’t this just your opinion?” Reading widely helps you prepare for this!

Quantitative Research

The core features of high-quality quantitative research are validity and reliability. Validity is about measuring the right thing and reliability is about measuring it well. Pazicni’s curated references for the MiCER19 conference are good for exploring these themes.

A specific useful video I have found is this tutorial on Crohnbach’s alpha, which is an important object in survey work when you are measuring a single construct.

General Advice

You are free to ignore any and all of this, but I offer these pieces of advice for people starting their ChemEd MChem projects.

Read a lot. For content. For structure. For slowly understanding what ‘rigour’ means. The start of the project will be unusually literature heavy, but it is good to read five papers a week once things settle down. Some people do one a day. Others set aside a day (maybe away from the office) to read all five. Reading is important academic labour; you should not feel like you have to do it ‘in your own time’.

Write a lot. Develop your writing ability deliberately and learn to love rewriting. Read Zinsser again - you cannot over-read Zinsser. 

Reflect on this link between data and argument, and how theories relate to both. The central academic skill is constructing arguments in writing from evidence and theory. Ask yourself ‘how did theory, data, and argument play out in this paper?’ every time you read something and every time you edit your own work.

Treat people with respect. Your participants are entitled to this ethically, but you are also extremely welcome to respect everyone else. Frustrations in research are very common, and it is good to be aware that such emotions might feel slightly overwhelming at first; try not to snap at anyone if this happens, and consider apologising the next day if it happens.

Use your University - there may be lecture courses in other departments which are helpful, and there may be researchers in other settings who can stimulate and support your work.

Be mercenary about the assessment. Your job is not to do perfect research. Your job is to write a thesis. You can’t write a thesis without good-enough research, but there will come a time when the correct decision is to stop researching and start writing. This will be difficult to do and you should do it anyway.

In Closing

I hope you find ChemEd to be worthy of your best efforts! I have found the community to be very supportive; I hope you do, too.