Educators from all over globe from places such as France, Nigeria, and Israel came together for one goal: to understand where misconceptions arise in student education while determining a way to improve teaching methods.

During spring break, chemistry teacher Rachel Freed attended the National Association for Research and Science Teaching (NARST), which was held in Rio Grande, Puerto Rico. At the conference, Freed attended lectures that were geared towards chemistry and technology.

Having spent the past two years researching and analyzing ways to enhance students’ understanding, Freed was excited to attend this event as a spectator rather than a presenter. Through several lectures and detailed discussions, she hoped to further her knowledge on the subject and pinpoint how misunderstandings about the curriculum of a class arise.

Freed was especially interested because the process of finding ways to prevent confusion about concepts taught in schools is meant to improve learning for students. In the past, she had worked very closely with students in classroom environments observing how to minimize uncertainty.

“We tried to develop a complete formative assessment system, a thorough way to draw out what students understand,” she said.

Through her previous research on six schools in Sonoma County, Freed was able to observe the success of the system named Diagnoser. Upon comparing the classes, one class that had incorporated the use of physical models and one that had not, she learned that the prior was far more successful.

Her research showed that confusion often came from an inability to see a situation, particularly in chemistry. Thus, Freed brainstormed methods to simplify the visualization of a chemical reaction for students.

For example, instead of simply carrying out a reaction through a lab, Freed wanted to expand the experience by demonstrating in another way as well: “hands on in two ways, hands on in terms of looking at a physical model, in addition to the hands on doing the chemical reaction,” Freed said.

According to Freed, though much research is done on learning and teaching, it is difficult for new ideas to be implemented in schools.

“A big theme in all the different research organizations that [researchers] have been talking about for 20 years is we have this huge body of research knowledge and it hardly ever gets down to practice in the classrooms,” Freed said.
Freed plans on presenting the new teaching methods she developed with her team to science teachers at the Upper School, hoping to implement it here as well.