Education:

B.S. Neuroscience, University of Iowa (2020)

Honors and Awards:

Recipient of 2019 Viksnis, Harris, and Padys Chemistry Department Award for Best Poster Presentation 

Hometown:

Mason City, Iowa

What do you enjoy doing in your free time?

In my free time, I enjoy playing hockey with the University of Iowa Women's Ice Hockey Team, spending time at local coffee shops, and attending Hawkeye football games.

How did you become interested in CER and what do you hope to do after your time in the Becker Group?

I joined a CER group with hopes of gaining research experience as an undergraduate student. I hope to attend dental school in my future, and being a part of a CER group has taught me the logistics of basic research. Researching has helped me improve my writing skills, critical thinking, and personal skills while interacting with others. Both dentistry and chemical education research involves working with humans that require both to be ethical by protecting the identity of their patients and subjects.

What is your main research project?

I am working on a Coordination Class Theory project that analyzes student ideas and reasoning about distribution graphs in chemistry. Using interview data from students enrolled in a general chemistry course in Spring of 2019, we are interested in better understanding the ideas that students bring in about the graphs and the key features that they focus on that help to explain their thinking. The attending features that students focused on in the prompts are classified as Readouts, as students read out the information in the graphs. We call their reasoning behind their ideas Knowledge Elements. We attempt to construct coordination classes that encompass each individual student's knowledge structure by connecting the Readouts and Knowledge Elements. With the information provided by the students, we try to determine their level of understanding as well as figure out how we can make improvements in students' learning in the future.

What interests you about this project?

I am interested in this project because I once took the general chemistry course that we are analyzing student data from and enjoy seeing how we can help to implement improvement in the course. When I was a student in the course, the exams were all multiple choice and scored on a curve. Now, the exams include a few short-answer questions and are no longer scored on a curve. I enjoy learning and teaching, and this project has allowed me to better understand the thinking of other students about topics in chemistry.