2025 AIChE Annual Meeting

(532c) Productive Confusion in Learning Thermodynamics

Authors

Shirin Kuppusamy, Tufts University
Claudia Henry, Tufts University
Sandra Huffman, Tufts University
Milo Koretsky, Oregon State University
Confusion is often something we try avoid in classroom environments. Students often interpret confusion as a sign they are not adequately understanding the course content while instructors may view confusion as a shortcoming of their delivery. Here we take a different stand. We view confusion as a knowledge practice where students engage in sensemaking around new or unclear norms, values, and skills in a discipline. Viewing confusion as a practice emphasizes it as a natural part of engaging in learning. The study of confusion is of interest to education researchers as it has implications for building productive learning environments and promoting student sensemaking. However, more work is needed to understand how confusion manifests and how problem design and instructional practices can be fine-tuned to assist students, as this phenomenon is heavily context-dependent.

This study is a part of a larger NSF-funded project that seeks to understand ambiguity, uncertainty, and confusion in introductory computing, physics, and chemical engineering courses. Here, we look to evaluate confusion in chemical engineering studios, a 50-minute weekly meeting that supplements lecture facilitated by graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) and undergraduate learning assistants (LAs), where students work in small groups to solve ambiguous problems. Three groups of consenting students were audio- and video-recorded for 15 weeks. We present findings from one studio activity, where students answered a question related to the phase changes of water under vacuum. We scaffold this study with the following research questions:

  1. What expressions of confusion manifest in small-group collaboration between second-year students solving open-ended problems in a chemical engineering thermodynamics class?
  2. How do interactions with the instructional staff address confusion? Are they productive?

Discourse analysis was used to analyze three transcripts to characterize how confusion manifests, its role in open-ended collaborative problem solving, and how interactions with the instructional team impact engaging in confusion. We report findings from two teams with very different engagement practices. From this preliminary work, we also identify how episodes of confusion exist on a spectrum from glorious confusion, or confusion that promotes sensemaking, to unproductive confusion, or confusion that hinders sensemaking. Instructors assist with shifting the trajectory of confusion students face through dialogic (student-centered) and authoritative (teacher-centered) facilitation moves. More broadly, these findings impact the direction of our future studies by scaffolding a situative framework for confusion and can help inform instructional practices and classroom ecosystems that promote student agency and authorship.