George F. Atkinson University of Waterloo Waterloo. Ontario Canada NPL 3Gl
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Peeling- the Onion or Rippling the Pond?
It is easy to grasp a wrong interpretation of an unlahelled diagram. Professor W. F. Graydon put the following sketch before a roomful of high school chemistry teachers (Fig. 1). "What is it?" asked Bill. "Conner . ion surrounded hv four water molecules." offered a voice. (General murmur of agreement.) "Wrone!" said Bill. "It's a bird's-eve view of four teddv hears playing b;idge!" Clearly, diagrams built of overlapping circles are easy to misinterpret. Nonetheless, such diagrams may offer a starting point for some examination of degree programs in chemistry. With such a diagram, we can show how a discipline is formally dissected into subdisciplines; some more internal and central, and others more peripheral though also more germinal for interdisciplinary crosslinkages. (Fig. 2). Similarly, a suhdiscipline can be shown broken into courses and these into t o ~ i c s and . so on like Jonathan Swift's infinite reeression of fleas ( 1). In each case, some subdivisions of the material will lie entirelv within the main boundarv and others to vawinn . extents oitside it. This wure content view of the subiect mav not please the teaching chemist whose vrimtation is more toward learning theory. Insteiid,astarting point which looks at Hloom'scog. nitive, affective and psychomotor domains may he appealing, (Fig. 3) though it may bring awareness of how heavily we favor the cognitive even in courses said to develop lab skills or to offer "education through chemistry" (2)and which thus might he expected to lean toward psychomotor or affective, respectively. How, you may ask, does the diagram help make this shift clear? Try to locate the course or program in the diagram in terms of its obiectives or intentions. Comnare that with the locus of its grade-earning activities. T h e shift toward the coenitive will usuallv he clear in the emohases of examinatima, tests, term papers, or reports. This dincwery should not s ~ ~ r ~ rUS. i s In e "hlt~tivationfor 1.earning." Krirksrn dwotes o n 6 one page to laboratories, which he &cusses purely as an expensive adjunct to cognitive learning (3).Bligh leans in a similar direction in remarks about the ineffectiveness of much laboratory teaching, hut grants that certain skills of observation and recording (still not nsvchomotor learnine) reauire labs (4). As to the aFflctive, ovfer"the years, higher educkion has withdrawn itself more and more from the affectual side of the learning process by implication of its shifts of practice
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Figure 1. (lefl)Ambiguous circle diagram Figure 2. (right) How a discipline is formallydissected into subdisciplines: same internal and central, others peripheral.
Figure 3. llefl)The relationshipsof Biwm's cqlnitive, affectiveand psychamota domains. Figure 4. (right) The organization of a typical course.
if not by forthright declaration. Chemistry is no exception to these trends. Possihlv affective learning is still wromoted t h o ~ ~ gnut h at:knowled&d in stated gradina practices. Pmsibly more lab? value aculiirina skills than rest them? We can hour so. Henry Bent s u g g e s t s , ~ n ecredit for entering the kingdim of God; three credits for attending lectures on entering the kingdom of God" (5).Are we practicing, "One credit for titrating correctly; three credits for listing points about titrating correctly"? Granting with some regret that Bloom's other two domains are rather neelected. and concentratine" for the moment on the cognitive side where the action is, let us look at the giving and takine of a oroeram as it usuallv hanoens. Comoared to our first picture i n ~ i g u r e2 of the brgGization of discipline, there is an interesting difference: the treatment of crosslinkages is usually sharply reduced. Indeed, to a first approximation, the diagram might nowreduce to a set of almost concentric circles (Fig. 4). This figure is often interpreted as a cross-section of an onion-we hegin to peel it. The discipline having been administratively divided into subdisciplines, some overlapping internally and some overflowine into coenate and ancillarv discinlines. a suhdiscinli~ s g i v i ncuvernge ~ nary yruup thttn f i ~ r r n ~ ~ l n t c s c ~ ~ r l r s ~selwtioe of its awn. On these. overlar~is sontrollrd and overfluw minimized, for who has time tdcover even the basics once-overlightly? An instructor is assigned to the course. He may select a textbook or reading list ranging beyond the course boundary, hut without question, the shorter course-length textbook is gaining popularity over the subject-length compendious book-a trend promoted by rising costs and falling attention spans and by the increasingly varied motivationsand vocations of students. Often, then, the text may lie within the course circle. Lectures are then organized and delivered, and usually deal with a portion of the textbook. Part of the lecture is emphasized on chalkboard or overhead nroiector. The students take notes which are selective summaries of the lectures and may be less than full transcripts of what appeared on the chalkboard or overhead projector. As examination time approaches, the lecturer devises auestions which usuallvfocus increasingly on the textbook, t h e lectures, and the key blackboard ooints; while the students on their side narrow their studying in the same direction. They, too, know the game, "This isn't about working as a chemist-it's a course
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Volume 57, Number 1. January 1980 1 33
and it's about getting marks." Within this diminished setting, the student writes and the marker grades. If grades are norm-referenced (a polite phrase for '%elled") the upper x percent pass. Even if criterion-referenced grading is done, answers a eood deal less than nerfect usuallv fulfill the requirement:~or many students,'the course is passed, and the nub of knowledee invoked on the examination can now fade into limbo wit( that which was judiciously abandoned by student or lecturer at some stage in oeelinp:the onion. It is a long way from here hack toihe s;hdisc:plinear the beginning. \loreover, it' this happens, i t rends to happen in eaih leciure course. ~ n i o n - ~ e &exercises n~ are on, reducing, particularizing, and isolating. Gestures and statements there may he about hroadening, crosslinking, and integrating, but the signals that count, such as the examinations, often say otherwise. And when you finish peeling an onion, you haven't much left. But nossihlv we have misinternreted the concentric circles picture. 1s it rLallv an onion to hk peelrd, or is it ripples on a mnd'? The examination uuestion recalling the instructor's kev word on the hoard, the lecture spreadingaround it, the welichosen textbook expanding the idea still further, and thereYources of lab and library enlarging it still more. Similar ripples from other kev words will interpenetrate and interact. reiniorcement of main kith planning and little luck ideas in the discil~lineand cancellation oiperwnal idios\w crasy and accidental error. Sometimes, fike the unkeyed suhharmonics generated in an organ, a new line of fundamental thought or an organizing idea will emerge to surprise the student and the lecturer. How can we encouraee " our students and ourselves toreact to the circles as ripples spreading rather than as an onion to he peeled? This is the kind of question Tom Lippincott has encouraged us all to consider over the years by his policies and bv his editorials. Can anvthing- effective he done? Here are a few ideas. One of my colleagues keeps permanently across the top of his office chalkboard, "What are we trying to do exactly?" We can begin with this spirit. Never mind the students; what do we think we are doing, and how does it compare with what we are doing? In Queen's University of Kingston, a few years ago an interesting exercise was carried out. The department members in several academic disciplines agreed on sets of labels for the parts of their disciplines. For each department, a grid was made showing these columns set against rows labelled introductorv. intermediate. and advanced. Each lecturer was asked to enter for his course exactly 10strokes in this grid to show the distribution of effort (and learning) expected. Then on a second diagram, he was asked to enter a similar 10 strokes showing that distribution not against topics, but against the loom cognitive levels from recall to ev&ation. All this was applied to curricula felt to he quite acceptable. On the content diagram, and again on the Bloom levels diagram, the findings for all courses were superimposed and displayed on an overhead projector. To everyone's surprise, one topic was completely untouched at intermediate level-everyone thought someone else did it! At the advanced level, several thinly populated courses were found to he trying to teach the same basic points, using different examples. As to cognitive levels, in practice there was a great deal of recall and not too much else! What are we trying to do really? And what are we doing? What about integrative courses to encourage the hroadening outlook? Or simply courses with a different organizing principle? The biologists can bring it all together in their final year with courses like ecology. Can we find a clue there? Think of a course looking a t one or two case studies of chemical industry, ranging through procurement of raw materials, selection of the chemistry to exploit from numerous possibilities, process development, coping with the by-products, and
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34 1 Journal of Chemical Education
quality control, to plant safety, and environmental protection. How would one well-chosen inorganic example (possibly the bromine and magnesium processes developed at Dow) and one organic example serve? A quick survey of a journal like Chemtech will suggest numerous starting points. Possibly we can take an even broader sweep and look for an integrating point of view to use throughout the degree program. A very successful example is set by Don Woods in reorganizing the Chemical Eneineerina...promam a t McMaster . Ynirt:riily around pruhlem solving, heginning at freshman level bv helpinr th(! studmts with [he macroscale problem ,,f adjusting to university learning, and with the microscale problem of doing their homework assignments (6).(Since this scheme is still growing, those wanting up-to-date information should contact Professor Woods.) "Nice ideas," you may say, "hut in the end the students make or break the scheme, and they want to know the payoff in makine the effort to gain an inteerative and exnandine view instead I > the contrac;/ng one t h a ~has traditionally p z d off under the ivstrm. Whv should thev. spread r i ~ o l e instead s of . peel onions? whatever the exams say will speak louder than all the preliminaries in the class during the term." That is quite true, hut the answer has been around for a long time. Lawyers pass an examination for admission to the bar. Doctors paha an exminorim for licensr to prnctice. Students i n many world-renowed un~wrsitiespass 3 ~ eoft final (lerree examinations which cover their whole . nroeram. Whv not a degree examination, of three or four papers ranging over broad areas of chemistrv (but not the traditional subdiscinline areas or textbook topics)? How about questions 1ike:'"~iscuss the carbonates of the first row of transition metals. Sueeest a practical line of experiments to determine the heat of formation and heat of solution of these comnounds. List several kinds of information you would seek in the literature in developing the details of such experiments, and suggest some of the journals and monographs most likely to prove helpful as sources for each." As an analytical chemist, I must include one special plea for analytical as the integrative focus. Here we have the need to deal with the descriptive chemistry of the materials, the physical chemistry of the measurement proeess (to say nothing of the related physics of the instruments involved), and the mathematics of the relationship between instrument response and the auantitv sought (which mav ranee from simnle arithmetic to fast ~ o u h e transformsj r and t h e statisticsof sampling and of data reduction. Each lends itself to an outwardspreading approach: from materials to related ones, from measurements to improved ones (maybe spurred on by the presence of older as well as newer devices in the undergraduate labs), and from simpler to more sophisticated mathematical methods. Tying these outward movements together is the basic question, whenever a chanae is mooted, "How does it improve the speed, accuracy or cost of the solution of the overall analytical problem?" Out of that can come some of the best integration of chemical understanding. Every instrument designer knows that differentiators tend to a m ~ l i f vthe noise and hurv the sienal. , while inteerators enhance the signal and suppress the noise. That states the challenge clearlv. Let us resnond to Tom Liwnincott's ureines .. and encouragement and design our programs to produce integrators.
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Literature Cited (1) Swift, Jonathan."On Poetry? lines 357.340. (21 Greenwood, N. W., inS>'mporium on Ch~rnicolEdurolionoi Tertiary Leual. (Swansea 1971lI.mdon,The British Awxiation,p. 15. ~ E ?o ~ ' M ~ c PIPEP, ~~Es~ la) ~ ~ i ~S. E., i c ~ ~ . lor L ~ ~ ~ A~I ~ U~. . university 1974, p. 16fi. (4) Biizh, D.. "Teaching Students? Exeta?, U. K., Exeter Universif.~Teaching Services. 1.. W n l.7.d.. . .F,-.
( 5 ) Bent, H. A.,d.CHEM. EDUC.. 5 4 4 6 2 11977). 1: 1, 218 ilS75). 161 Wmdr, D.K . e l 01.. Anna1xdEn~inc~rrinl:Educolion
