Sonia M. Underwood

Biochemistry occupies a unique position at the intersection of chemistry and biology, yet undergraduate biochemistry courses are taught within a wide variety of institutional and disciplinary contexts. Because instructors’ disciplinary preparation may influence how they conceptualize and teach foundational biochemical concepts, understanding where biochemistry is taught represents an important first step toward examining how disciplinary background may shape undergraduate biochemistry education. This article presents a national landscape of foundational biochemistry courses across the United States by examining four guiding questions: 1) which institutions should be included in this landscape? 2) what types of courses should be included? 3) which departments are teaching biochemistry courses? and 4) which textbook(s) are associated with these courses?. Using publicly available information from 692 American Chemical Society-approved institutions, we identified 1 063 foundational biochemistry courses. Although chemistry and chemistry and biochemistry departments collectively account for the majority of these courses, undergraduate biochemistry is taught across numerous departmental structures, with nearly one-third of institutions offering foundational biochemistry through multiple departments. In addition, at least 28 different textbooks were identified among courses for which textbook information was publicly available, suggesting considerable diversity in the curricular resources. Together, these findings demonstrate that undergraduate biochemistry exists within multiple disciplinary contexts rather than as a single instructional framework. This landscape provides a foundation for future research to examine how instructors’ disciplinary backgrounds influence Pedagogical Content Knowledge, curricular decisions, instructional practices, and student learning outcomes while informing broader conversations about shared learning goals for undergraduate biochemistry.

As chemistry expands across interdisciplinary boundaries and diverse career sectors, examining how professional identity is constructed becomes crucial for understanding field dynamics and career development patterns. This study investigates how individuals at various levels of education and professional careers in chemistry define and describe chemistry identity. Using semistructured interviews with undergraduate students and chemistry professionals across academic, industry, and government job sectors, we investigated the ways participants (N = 43) described and characterized a chemist or a “chemistry person,” including how this characterization influenced self-identification and evaluation of others in the field. Drawing on Social Identity Theory, our analysis reveals that there is a notion of a “true” or more “legitimate” chemist within the community based on a “pure chemist” stereotype, which is characterized by having a chemistry degree, conducting research in academia, and doing molecular-level work. In practice, this means that there are groups within the community excluded, including biochemists, chemical engineers, chemistry education researchers, and chemists in industry, based on ideals of “academic purity” that privilege and reserve rigor only to certain chemistry subdisciplines and job sectors. The results indicate a basic tension between the characterization of chemistry as the “central science,” and the increasingly bounded identity practices that limit impositions of interdisciplinary views. Deeper examination of our data reflects how chemistry identity is constructed within practices of morality that place “pure” chemistry at the top, while systematically marginalizing those who work across disciplinary lines. These exclusionary practices continue, as they are framed to be maintaining scientific integrity, and not bias, making them difficult to challenge while also creating sustained problems for diversity and retention in the field.

In recent years, much of the emphasis for transformation of introductory STEM courses has focused on “active learning”, and while this approach has been shown to produce more equitable outcomes for students, the construct of “active learning” is somewhat ill-defined and is often used as a “catch-all” that can encompass a wide range of pedagogical techniques. Here we present an alternative approach for how to think about the transformation of STEM courses that focuses instead on what students should know and what they can do with that knowledge. This approach, known as three-dimensional learning (3DL), emerged from the National Academy’s “A Framework for K-12 Science Education”, which describes a vision for science education that centers the role of constructing productive causal accounts for phenomena. Over the past 10 years, we have collected data from introductory biology, chemistry, and physics courses to assess the impact of such a transformation on higher education courses. Here we report on an analysis of video data of class sessions that allows us to characterize these sessions as active, 3D, neither, or both 3D and active. We find that 3D classes are likely to also involve student engagement (i.e. be active), but the reverse is not necessarily true. That is, focusing on transformations involving 3DL also tends to increase student engagement, whereas focusing solely on student engagement might result in courses where students are engaged in activities that do not involve meaningful engagement with core ideas of the discipline.

In recent years, much of the emphasis for transformation of introductory STEM courses has focused on “active learning”, and while this approach has been shown to produce more equitable outcomes for students, the construct of “active learning” is somewhat ill-defined, and can encompass a wide range of pedagogical techniques. Here we present an alternative approach for how to think about the transformation of STEM courses that focuses instead on what students should know and what they can do with that knowledge. This approach, known as three-dimensional learning (3DL), emerged from the National Academy’s “A Framework for K-12 Science Education”, which describes a vision for science education that centers the role of constructing productive causal accounts for phenomena. Over the past 10 years, we have collected data from introductory biology, chemistry, and physics courses to assess the impact of such a transformation on higher education courses. Here we report on an analysis of video data of class sessions that allows us to characterize these sessions as active, 3D, neither , or both 3D and active . We find that 3D classes are likely to also involve student engagement (i.e. be active), but the reverse is not necessarily true. That is, focusing on transformations involving 3DL also tends to increase student engagement, whereas focusing solely on student engagement might result in courses where students are engaged in activities that do not involve meaningful engagement with core ideas of the discipline.

This study investigated what students perceived to be the “take-home” messages for their introductory chemistry and biology courses and how students view these courses as connected. The findings provide evidence of the connected nature of these two courses and serve as a starting point for further discussions.