Alexey Leontyev, PhD

Dr. Alexey Leontyev is a fellow at the Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth and an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at North Dakota State University. His research focuses on chemistry education, with an emphasis on assessing student learning and affective engagement in green chemistry and organic chemistry. He has published in Green Chemistry and the Journal of Chemical Education, and edited a book on active learning in organic chemistry. He serves on national committees within the American Chemical Society Examination Institute and is involved in several NSF-funded projects. Alexey is interested in how green chemistry contributes to human flourishing and the role institutions play in supporting sustainable innovation.

My research focuses on Chemistry Education, particularly on developing assessment tools to measure students' knowledge and affective responses to green chemistry.

Green Chemistry Education: There's a rising public interest in environmental issues, and students are eager to learn about green chemistry and sustainability. Despite many curricula incorporating green chemistry, few efforts have been made to assess its impact on student learning. A major challenge in this field is the absence of assessments that can reliably and validly measure students' understanding of green chemistry. In my research group, we are dedicated to developing and evaluating tools that assess students' knowledge and affective characteristics—such as attitudes, sense of belonging, and motivation—pertaining to sustainability.

Evaluation of Instructional Innovations: We employ a variety of methodological approaches to evaluate innovative teaching methods. Here are two examples:

1. Alternative Grading Practices: These are increasingly adopted by undergraduate chemistry faculty across the United States. While there is literature on the implementation of such practices, detailed explorations of faculty motivations are scarce. We have conducted interviews and surveys with faculty who use alternative grading to understand their perceptions and the challenges they face in implementation.
2. Flipped Learning: This teaching approach, where traditional lecture and homework roles are reversed, has grown in popularity. In the flipped classroom, students review lecture materials on their own time and use classroom time to work on problems typically assigned as homework. While more studies are assessing the effectiveness of flipped classrooms, the results vary significantly, often due to small sample sizes. We applied a meta-analytical approach to synthesize findings from various studies on flipped instruction in chemistry courses, aiming to draw more robust conclusions.