What Do We Miss about Students' Individual Decision Making by Focusing Only on Overall Trends?

Many in the higher education community, including chemistry educators, are appropriately worried about trends in retention, often at both the local and national levels. Such trends inherently distill the experiences of individuals within large groups of students into larger samples in order to understand how the trends themselves may be evolving. While this focus is reasonable and appropriate, research about how individuals make choices about their academic identities is arguably at the core of the trends. One area of research, the application of narrative methodology for individual decision making, presents an interesting template for such consideration. This research is interesting, because anecdotally many chemistry instructors likely hear expressions from students who are stopping their study of chemistry that are akin to the observations of the research base. Considering a new scholarly synthesis of how individuals find their way into and, most importantly, out of the study of chemistry is a useful complement to the larger studies about trends in retention.