Undergraduate Chemistry Education: A Workshop Summary by Keegan Sawyer

Author:Keegan Sawyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The National Academies Press
Published: 2014-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

DEALING WITH RISK, FAILURE, AND UNCERTAINTY

The challenge that Jeffrey Moore is tackling at the University of Illinois with his instructional experimentation is to center instruction on the individual learner in what he called the “kilostudent” organic chemistry classroom consisting of a diverse set of nonchemistry majors who, in most cases, are taking their last formal course in chemistry. His approach to meeting that challenge has been to reconfigure the learning outcomes of the course to match the grand challenges in science education enumerated in the 2013 special issue of the journal Science (McNutt 2013) and to design a curriculum that uses theory webcasts to present concepts, pressure-point problems to immerse the student in experience, problem-of-the-day discussions, and peer-to-peer tutoring.

One of the key features of the course is its use of online electronic homework, which for organic chemistry works out wonderfully with machine-read computer drawings that can be automatically graded using a programmed graphical language. There is no textbook in the course, though there is a set of course notes that accompany the 5-minute webcasts that the students view before attending a discussion session. The discussion sessions are held in a computer lab that can accommodate 55 students at a time, or via an Internet connection at two times daily. At the end of the discussion session, the students are presented with a pressure-point problem that they have 5 minutes to solve. Successfully answering the question yields bonus points that are applied to the next exam.

These complex problems, explained Moore, are designed to take students into uncharted territory and force them to take risks and fail, just as scientists do in the real world (see Figure 3-5). He called this “taking off the training wheels,” and said it teaches students about failure and how to respond to that failure. The problems are nonalgorithmic and multifaceted, and multiple steps are involved in solving them. Students are forced to use creative processes to generate a variety of initial-guess solutions and to develop a strategy to initiate a solution. They are also allowed to access the literature or any other online resource—except communicating with another person—to solve the problem. No points are given for an incorrect answer, but students are allowed to continue trying to solve the problem until they get the correct answer. Because the students are developing and refining their solutions online, the computer can track the progress they are making toward the solution. When plotted, these data provide a picture of how the exam is going and how each student is doing in real time (see Figure 3-6).

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