on this page
Graduate studies
Honours projects
JournalsChemistry around us
Societies
Lab resources
Writing resources and referencing
Graduate Studies at uOttawa
Graduate studies at uOttawa, including how to apply
Graduate studies handbook: English | French
International student? Learn more here
Honours projects
Here is the webpage for students working on Honours projects in Biology and Biomolecular Sciences
JOURNALS
Chemistry Education Research
Science research
Educational research
CHEMISTRY AROUND US
Chemistry at the University of Ottawa
nobelprize.org Check out “Chemistry matters”
McGill Office for Science and Society
SOCIETIES
The Chemical Institute of Canada
Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
National Associate for Research in Science Teaching
Laboratory Resources
Zubrick, J. W., The Organic Chem Lab Survival Manual. Seventh ed.; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
uOttawa and Course Links
Chemdraw: a chemistry drawing program
Writing resources
Edit your own work: learn a 5-layer writing strategy from the big picture to the final proof, with structure, continuity, and clarity in between. A site with examples from law but very relevant to other disciplines, too. As supervisors or colleagues providing feedback, we can point to specific layers or sub-sections of the work that can be improved.
Referencing
APA style (Education, psychology)
Mendeley (Citation management software)
The limitations of student evaluations of teaching
Key issues: (1) significant bias in student evaluations of teaching against female and minority instructors in particular, (2) SETs report student satisfaction with the course and not learning—there is little correlation with learning outcomes. Yet, these evaluations are often used for core decisions about a person’s career, including tenure and promotion.
Anna Boring “Student evaluations of teaching are not only unreliable, they are significantly biased against female instructors”
Colleen Flaherty “Even ‘Valid’ Student Evaluations Are ‘Unfair’”, Inside Higher Ed., 2020. LINK
Original study LINK
Colleen Flaherty “Teaching Eval Shake-Up”, Inside Higher Ed., 2018. LINK
Related study LINK
DIfferent types of CHemistry Education Research
Chemistry education research (CER) necessarily overlaps with broader issues in education. For example, our group has worked on a diverse range of projects, including how students use the electron-pushing formalism in organic chemistry, systems thinking in chemistry education, and the research experiences of chemistry trainees who are learning English-as-an-additional language. How do these different types of projects fit within CER?
Taber (2013) and Seery et al. (2019) provide a useful framework for thinking about different types of CER:
Inherent CER: Concerns explored arise from the specific nature of teaching and learning chemistry as a curriculum subject.
Embedded in CER: Concerns explored arise from general issues in teaching and learning, but have been conceptualised within the specific context of teaching and learning chemistry.
Collateral to CER: Concerns explored arise from, and are conceptualised as, general issues in teaching and learning, and chemistry teaching/learning simply provides a convenient context for data collection.