Chemistry education research (CER) investigates how students learn chemistry and works to develop evidence-based teaching practices. CER is grounded in knowledge of chemistry content and skills and integrates theoretical frameworks and research methodologies from fields including psychology and education. The field of CER is a specific area within the broader discipline-based education research (DBER) community and working in CER offers many opportunities for collaboration with other DBER community members. At SDSU this work is supported by the Center for Research in Mathematics and Science Education (CRMSE).
Research in the Komperda group is primarily quantitative and has two main areas of emphasis. The first focus is investigating issues of measurement and psychometric instrumentation in chemistry education. Having tools available to make high quality measurements is crucial to generating valid and reliable data. These data support chemistry and other discipline-based education researchers when measuring variables in various classroom and research contexts. A common theme throughout all areas of our research is use of the open-source R statistical software to encourage reproducible research through code sharing.
View our Current Projects