What does empathy look like to you? investigating undergraduate chemistry students’ perceptions of empathy in regard to their lived experience at university

Abstract

Empathy and its impact on students’ learning experience remains an under-researched topic in the field of affective chemistry education research. The purpose of this study was to investigate tertiary students’ understanding and perceptions of empathy with regard to their lived experience at university. This qualitative study consisted of individual semi-structured interviews with 13 undergraduate students enrolled in first-year chemistry courses at an Australian university. Abductive thematic analysis of students’ interview responses revealed that students perceived empathy predominantly as cognitive and behavioural processes. Participants perceived some university teaching roles, such as tutors and laboratory demonstrators, to be higher in empathy than others, such as lectures and course coordinators. In addition, participants did not perceive university infrastructure, either people-based (i.e. student support centre, technical support infrastructure, inclusion and disability infrastructure, etc.) or technology-based (i.e. online enrolment and timetabling platforms and learning management systems) to be empathetic. Participants described factors such as context and lived experience influencing their perception of empathy at university. Furthermore, participants made suggestions on ways to improve how empathy could be shown to students, including improving teacher communication; implementing empathetic course design in first-year chemistry courses; showing more leniency towards students; and increasing ease of use and access to infrastructure. This study aims to investigate empathy from the chemistry student perspective and help identify where teacher empathy could be best deployed within student–teacher interactions, specifically in tertiary chemistry education settings.