Chemical Education Today
curricular change digests
edited by
Baird W. Lloyd Miami University Middletown Middletown, OH 45042
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Physical Chemistry Students Explore Nonlinear Curve Fitting On-Line
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An Experiment In Developing An Intercollegiate Learning Community by Deborah Sauder, Marcy Hamby Towns, Roland Stout, George Long, and Theresa Julia Zielinski tributed by listserv was the intended primary communicaAn intercollegiate physical chemistry learning commution tool for both students and instructors. Students were nity self-assembled in late August and early September expected to exchange ideas and construct their understand1996 to prepare a WWW venture for students studying gas ing of the topic through interaction with the laws and thermodymaterial, use of the mathematics software, namics in physical and interaction with their peers at the other chemistry. The com- The project attempted to expand successparticipating campuses. munity included facOur students displayed an interesting ulty and students ful cooperative learning activities beyond set of behaviors during the on-line course segfrom four geographi- classroom walls. ment. After obtaining the play and data from cally dispersed camthe Web page, they all seemed to get stuck. puses: Hood College, Their overall behavior ranged from complete frustration Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), the University and inability to use the data and tools for the project to of North Carolina at Pembroke, and Niagara University varying degrees of success at obtaining at least the a and b (NU). One faculty observer, Barbara A. Bansenauer from values for the fitting of the two gas laws to the pressure the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, and a faculty asdata for nitrogen. Eventually all of them were able to fit sessment specialist, Marcy Hamby Towns from Ball State the ideal gas law to the data using the gas constant R as a University in Muncie, Indiana, brought the faculty corps to fitting parameter. Of course this value of R was not the six. The goal of the community was to provide students with same as that found in text books. One group even suggested a cutting-edge technology-based learning experience for one physical chemistry topic. that the data were wrong. In the end the agreement on this The on-line venture was designed to foster the develfirst step was unanimous and all groups recognized that the opment of connections between topics in the chemistry curgas was not ideal at the temperature for the given pressure riculum and to increase retention of the topic concepts data. All of the groups had more trouble finding the a and b through the rich contextual format of a case study. The values for the van der Waals equation but eventually project attempted to expand successful cooperative learnachieved this objective. Work with the RK equation was ing activities beyond classroom walls. This is the second in more problematic, as several groups obtained a negative a series of intercollegiate physical chemistry activities. The value for the RK b parameter. None of the groups obtained first, a study of flame temperatures, is described in “Physithe standard deviations of the fitting parameters and none cal Chemistry On-Line: A Small Scale Intercollegiate Interused the F test for determining the best mathematical active Learning Experience” by G. Long, R. Howald, C. A. model to use to represent the gas sample. Miderski, and T. J. Zielinski, Chem. Educator 1(3): S 1430The students clearly had difficulties in understanding 4171(96)03032-4 [available at URL: http://journals. or utilizing statistical concepts and were unable to extract springer-ny.com/chedr (1996)]. Zielinski was the faculty fathese concepts from written sources. All struggled with uscilitator for both projects, providing the neutral voice that ing their mathematical engines, Maple and Mathcad, even responded to student questions and promoted communicathough some had used these in other courses. Technology tion throughout the community. glitches also stymied the project. The Internet connections A play entitled It’s a Gas, written by Zielinski, prewere at times unstable so that e-mail took several days to sented the core of the project in a case-study format. In the arrive at a destination. The listserv software was not roplay a younger untenured faculty member, Doc. Red, and bust enough to push e-mail for the time required to get it an emeritus senior colleague, Prof. Wall, discuss how an through and a natural disaster put one campus off line for equation engine software package such as Mathcad can be almost half of the learning community experiment. used to have students learn how to do nonlinear curve fitIn addition to the technology problems there are those ting and “discover” the a and b values for the van der Waals we must face as we try to get our students to be more proand the Redlich–Kwong equations along with the standard active as learners. Students may be interested in using techdeviations of these parameters. The students would, as a nology but they are shy and untrained. They are used to closure activity, use the F test to choose the best mathematiclosed-form problems, especially those that can be solved in cal model for the data. Doc. Red is sure the students can do a 10- to 20-minute time slice. This makes it difficult or imthe project. The cautious Prof. Wall thinks the project is too possible for them to design their own plan of action for solvhard for the typical physical chemistry student. ing original or open-ended problems similar to those enFrom the play our students obtained the objectives of countered in research. They may also be intimidated by unthe exercise and the accessory materials, embedded as familiar software. This is compounded by the whole issue HTML hot links, for completion of the project. Email disof the longstanding reputation and perception of the role of
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Chemical Education Today mathematics in physical chemistry. As we design new technological and context-rich experiences for our students we find ourselves between a rock and a hard place. Students need authentic “problems”, not just exercises to solve. They need practice in analyzing authentic problems and adapting what they know to new situations. They …middle-level students may also need help in forwere better able to cope mulating questions so with the ambiguity of the that they can gain access to the information they case-study process… need to solve these problems. After years of atthan some traditional tending lectures they high achievers, who clearly know how to listen, but they do not know how found that their usual to engage in a scientific problem-solving skills did dialogue. The It’s a Gas case not work in this situation. was a very good exercise for getting students to dig into a complex problem and carry it through to a conclusion. More than half of the students worked very hard and made substantial progress, negotiating several potential pitfalls along the way—mostly having to do with the process of learning enough Maple or Mathcad to use it in a complex way. As a consequence of the project many of the students display increased self-confidence in their ability to solve problems. Other students were overly intimidated by the project from the start and made far less progress. In some cases we needed to intervene and give these students a major clue about how to get started. One of us noticed that middle-level students were better able to cope with the ambiguity of the case-study process and move quickly to make and execute a plan than some traditional high achievers, who found that their usual problem-solving skills did not work in this situation. Although the on-line segment did not meet the full expectations of the faculty participants, we learned a great deal about how to do this type of project and we are planning another event for the spring. We think the students learned some important lessons and were ushered into the methods of scientific work where there are no guarantees of success and where much elbow grease is needed to bring a project to completion. We also had time to reflect on how we could better support student learning when we use a non-dispensing-of-information mode of instruction.
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We may have hit the students with too many unfamiliar tasks all at once. Although they seemed to like the idea of on-line interaction, it takes them much longer to write, especially as they were not very confident with the material. This type of project was so new to them that it took almost two weeks before they were familiar enough with the concepts to talk about them. Think about it—they were learning Mathcad or Maple, statistics, real gases; remembering calculus; using a new medium to communicate; and getting used to new professors. In addition they had to figure out many things by themselves (there were no cookbook solutions in this project). We applaud our students for the good spirit they showed in the face of the challenges we set for them. We are analyzing the assessment comments made by both students and faculty. These will focus our plans for the upcoming spring on-line physical chemistry experiment in which we will explore a topic in quantum chemistry. We encourage other faculty to explore creative uses for the WWW as an instructional tool. As we continue our assessment of the project and prepare the Web site for the next venture, additional information will be deposited at http:// www.iup.edu/~grlong/pcol.htm or http://www.niagara. edu/~tjz/cases.html/ for interested faculty to review. We hope that our on-line experiment will serve as a learningcommunity model for collegial interaction among teachers and students of physical chemistry. Note 1. A longer complementary description of the project with accessory materials will appear in JCE: Online: http:// jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/.
Deborah Sauder teaches in the Department of Chemistry at Hood College, Frederick, MD 21701;
[email protected]. Marcy Hamby Towns teaches in the Department of Chemistry at Ball State University, Muncie, IN 47306;
[email protected]. Roland Stout teaches in the Department of Physical Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, Pembroke, NC 28372;
[email protected]. Theresa Julia Zielinski teaches in the Department of Chemistry and Physics, Niagara University, Niagara University, NY 14109;
[email protected]. George Long teaches in the Department of Chemistry, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA 15705-1090;
[email protected].
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 74 No. 3 March 1997
