People

Maia Popova

Maia Popova
Title: Associate Professor
Field: Chemistry Education Research
Room: 404 Sullivan Science Building
Phone: 336.256.0183
Email: m_popova@uncg.edu
Research Website: https://chem.uncg.edu/popova/

Education

B.S., Ivanovo State University, Russia (2013)
Ph.D., Miami University, Ohio (2018)
Post Doc, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Nebraska (2019)

Research

Research in the Popova Group focuses on three main areas:
  • Chemistry students’ representational competence. We designed multiple studies that investigate faculty instructional practices for developing student representational competence, evaluate the effectiveness of chemistry textbooks for promoting student representational competence, characterize student reasoning with representations using cognitive interviews and/or eye-tracking, and design an assessment to measure student representational competence.
  • Chemistry faculty pedagogical reasoning and instructional practices. Current projects in the group investigate chemistry faculty pedagogical reasoning and instructional practices for teaching symmetry in inorganic chemistry learning environments and developing student representational competence in organic chemistry learning environments.
  • Diversity, equity, inclusion, and access in chemistry education. We are working on studies characterizing the experiences of marginalized women pursuing Ph.D. in chemistry, evaluating the departmental climate around diversity, equity, and inclusion, and characterizing the experiences of neurodivergent students learning chemistry.
Please see our website for a more detailed description of projects and to learn about our research group. 
 

We are looking for team members (undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars) with enthusiasm for investigating the best practices of teaching and learning of chemistry!

Representative Publications