Learning Goals and Priorities Identified by an Examination of Chemistry Graduate Handbooks

The commonly accepted goal of doctoral education is to train students to be independent researchers and scientists. The backward design framework was used to model how graduate handbooks should be developed; by setting measurable outcomes and working backward to design programmatic elements that will meet those desired goals. Under the backward design framework, each of the programmatic elements of doctoral programs is based on learning goals designed to help to progress students to accomplish this overarching goal. Because the graduate student handbook represents the primary documentation of programmatic elements, it is possibly the only place where learning goals are explicitly written out. In this qualitative study, publicly available graduate handbooks from 60 chemistry departments were investigated for the learning goals of the programmatic elements to know how these contribute to the overarching goal of graduate education and compared to a literature-based model of the goals of each major programmatic element. Through document and thematic analysis, we found that most handbooks did not explicitly state the learning goals of the programmatic elements, indicating that backward design was not likely implemented fully during the crafting of these documents. Considering the prior success of backward design, this study implies that graduate handbooks written with an explicit alignment with backward design could better prepare students for the workforce and more broadly meet the desired goals of doctorate-level chemistry education.