Chemical Education Today
Workshop Report
Improving the Teaching/Learning Process in General Chemistry Report on the 1997 Stony Brook General Chemistry Teaching Workshop David Hanson and Troy Wolfskill Department of Chemistry, State University of New York Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794-3400
Motivated by the widespread recognition that traditional teaching methods at postsecondary institutions no longer are meeting students’ educational needs, 59 participants came to the first Stony Brook General Chemistry Teaching Workshop, July 20–July 25, 1997, on improving the teaching/learning process in General Chemistry. The instructors from 42 institutions across the country, including community colleges, liberal-arts colleges, and large research universities, had mutual concerns that students are having difficulty understanding and applying concepts, finding relevance, transferring knowledge within and across disciplines, and identifying and developing skills needed for success in college and a career. This situation has come about because challenges posed by students’ increasing diversity in academic preparation, cultural background, motivation, and career goals go unmet, with too many courses maintaining the conventional objective of structuring and presenting information. To address these issues, four goals were set for the workshop: 1. To implement and assess a participant-centered model for the conference that was consistent with studentcentered models for the classroom. 2. To provide participants with new experiences, insights, and methods that they could take back to their classrooms. 3. To provide innovators in chemical education with a forum for sharing their ideas and methods and for receiving feedback to improve those methods. 4. To forge new collaborations aimed at developing materials to improve the teaching/learning process in General Chemistry. The Participant-Centered Conference Modeled after a Student-Centered Classroom
The primary focus of the Workshop was to introduce participants to reform initiatives that shift the focus of the classroom from the teacher to the student, either by engaging students through in-class activities or by allowing students to become involved in determining the structure and even the content of the course. The organizers felt that the only organizational strategy consistent with this focus would be to have a participant-centered conference. This format was implemented by first asking the workshop participants to select and rank issues to be addressed. Based on the information received, workshop sessions and leaders were then selected. In each workshop session, the leaders gave a brief introduction to the topic and then facilitated participant-centered activities and discussions. In addition to the formal sessions, time was set aside each afternoon and evening for participants to organize their own workshops and discussions.
Process Is the Missing Element in the Curriculum
Process education is defined as an educational philosophy that focuses on improving the performance skills needed for success in college and a career, for lifelong learning, and for continued growth through ongoing self-assessment. It can be thought of as education in the processes of learning. Implementation of this philosophy requires a shift in perspective from many of the traditional views of the teaching/learning process. There is a shift from a focus on the quantity of accumulated knowledge (subject content or product) to improving the quality of the students’ learning process. There is a shift away from a faculty-centered learning environment to a student-centered learning environment in which there is shared ownership, high expectation for performance, mutual respect, and a learning community where each individual is helping every other individual to improve performance skills through quality peer assessment and self-assessment. The passive learner, who is told what to learn in a defined sequence, becomes an active self-educator who has educational, career, and life goals and implements her or his own methods and measures for success. There is a redesign of the curriculum from presentation of information to an activity approach, and there is a shift from discrete evaluation of knowledge to a continuous assessment of performance. Process workshops represent a new way of teaching being developed at Stony Brook in General Chemistry. These workshops combine team learning, guided discovery, critical thinking, problem solving, reporting, personalized assignments, and assessment into a coherent package. The workshop structure is designed to promote the development of skills in the areas of information processing, critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork, communication, management, and assessment. In a process workshop the students work in self-managed teams on activities that involve guided discovery, critical thinking, and problem solving and include reflection on learning and assessment of performance. A team is composed of three or four students, each member having specific responsibilities. Each team reports its results to the class and assesses its own work. At the end of the workshop, each student receives a personalized quiz for homework, which is computer generated and graded. The evaluation of this initiative in three General Chemistry courses at Stony Brook has been very encouraging. It was found that: 1. More than 90% of the students found the assignment and workshop questions and problems challenging, worthwhile, and helpful.
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Workshop Report 2. Significant numbers of students reported that the workshop increased their interest in chemistry and increased their confidence in studying and learning chemistry. 3. The workshop instructors received A and A+ ratings from the students, revealing positive student attitudes. 4. Examinations showed significant shifts of students from lower scores to higher scores, uniform for lowthrough high-achieving students. Averaged over all examinations, 200 more students of 1000 total scored above the 50% level in Fall 1994 than in Fall 1993, which was the semester before the workshops were implemented. 5. Exam grades were highly correlated with workshop and personalized assignment grades. Thus, a student can be shown that regular and persistent attention to learning and problem solving gives a clear route to success on examinations. 6. Instructors reported an improvement in student process skills throughout the course of the semester. Peer-Led Learning Teams
In the model of peer-led learning teams, which is being developed by the NSF-funded Workshop Chemistry Project, students who have successfully completed a course are invited to become peer leaders in two-hour workshops that complement the lecture and laboratory segments of the course. Peer leaders are not expected to be experts in chemistry, but rather to be experienced coaches in learning chemistry. In the workshop, students are guided by a mentor who very often becomes a role model. The small group environment provides an opportunity for all students to express themselves and to learn from each other. Group cohesion develops over the course of the semester, and students gain the sense that they belong to a community of learners. The following components have been found to be essential for the successful implementation of this model. 1. Small peer-led groups of six to eight students meet each week as an integral part of the course structure. The students work cooperatively on structured problems. 2. The peer leader is a student who has successfully completed the course. 3. The role of the leader is to act as a guide or mentor, rather than a lecturer or tutor. 4. The peer leaders are trained in group dynamics and basics of learning theory. 5. The faculty meet with the leaders each week to discuss problem-solving strategies and to model the activities of the workshops.
Peer-led workshops have been successfully adopted at several institutions. The results are very clear. Students and faculty like the format and believe it facilitates learning. Statistically significant results show that the workshops lead to better grades and greater success (i.e., a greater percentage of students earn a C or better). Improvements in the success of courses (e.g., improved retention) have been recognized as gains in faculty and institutional productivity. The reasons for the success of the workshops are not hard to find. The 144
active personal intellectual engagement of the students with the material and with each other—and ultimately with the instructor—is at the heart of the workshop model. Integrating Chemistry, Mathematics, and Physics
Currently integration of the concepts and content of courses is left to the least-skilled learners, the students. Textbooks and classroom lessons generally ignore the skills and background needed from other disciplines. These thoughts alone should provide motivation to integrate our courses. From the perspective of a chemist, there are several other reasons to integrate chemistry, mathematics, and physics courses. Integration enables a full discussion of chemical concepts, allows prerequisite knowledge embedded in the chemical concepts to be explored, opens the way for comparisons and contrasts of the cultures of the disciplines, and elevates the process of transferring knowledge to new contexts to an intellectual endeavor equivalent to learning new content. The primary tool in integrating course content is deconstruction. The embedded knowledge and cultural contexts of topics need to be identified. This process highlights the implicit key concepts and forces confrontation with the cultural differences between disciplines regarding what constitutes understanding and explanation. For example, ask a physicist and a chemist “Why do helium or hot-air balloons rise?” The physicist is likely to refer to the buoyant force being greater than the gravitational force, while the chemist probably will identify the gas inside the balloon as being less dense than the surrounding air. The culture of physics looks for an explanation in terms of forces, while the culture of chemistry provides an explanation in terms of the properties of matter. In an integrated course, these differing perspectives must be reconciled and an explanation sought at a more fundamental level, with a deeper understanding. The premise is that in an integrated course, students will do better in all the components, and assessments have supported this premise. Writing Can Be an Effective Learning Tool in Chemistry
Writing not only is a professional skill, it represents the thinking process; and if it is important, it must be an integral part of the curriculum. Chemistry faculty generally have encountered barriers to using writing in their courses: no strategy or plan has been identified, no methodology for designing an assignment is available, and it is not clear how to assess and evaluate the product efficiently and effectively. These issues were addressed at the conference. Writing assignments can follow a conceptual hierarchy (listing, defining, ordering, classifying, summarizing, comparing and contrasting, analyzing, and presenting a scientific argument) at different levels of difficulty (easy, intermediate, difficult, and complex). They can be presented in several different formats: an abstract, an annotated bibliography, a journal article, a short in-class essay, a microtheme, a concept or term papers, a literature review, a laboratory report, a proposal, a technical memo, a resume, a biography, a popular article, or a historical or philosophical paper.
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Chemical Education Today
Writing assignments can be used to promote skill development (summarize a reading assignment), conceptual understanding (explain and provide examples), integration with other disciplines (discuss how Newton’s law and the ideal gas law are related), relevance (describe an application), and enrichment (identify, describe, and discuss the impact of a potential application of a polymer now being researched). Computer Technology Can Improve Learning
Two computer-based learning systems were described that can be used to improve the teaching/learning process by increasing the interaction of students with each other, and by providing tutorial lessons. Each system gives the student an array of options to promote understanding of concepts. OWL (On-Line Web-Based Learning) is being developed at the University of Massachusetts. LUCID (Learning and Understanding through Computer-Based Interactive Discovery) is being developed at Stony Brook. OWL is being developed in three stages. Basic OWL provides an electronic homework system, Discovery OWL adds computer simulations of chemical phenomena, and OWL Tutor incorporates intelligent tutoring. LUCID provides dynamic, highly interactive models for students to explore in response to key questions aimed at developing conceptual understanding. This knowledge is then applied in exercises and problems to which instant feedback is provided. A unique feature being incorporated into the design of LUCID is networked peer assessment, to enable student work to be shared and critiqued efficiently. Such peer assessment stimulates higher quality reporting by the students and helps assure that conceptual understanding has been attained. Probing Students’ Thinking Processes and Mental Models
While course assessments generally focus on what students have learned or how they like a course, the issue of what misconceptions students have developed is often overlooked. Concept questions and challenge problems, which are being developed by the NSF-funded New Traditions Project, were presented as ways of engaging students in large or small classes in order to reveal and address misconceptions. A most sobering report was made on the persistence of misconceptions through the successful completion of a general chemistry course. Participants agreed that we need to put greater effort into identifying misconceptions and be able to ask the key questions that force students to confront the failure of these misconceptions to explain natural phenomena. It also is important to identify the learning process that
students use. Observations and analysis of students working in groups in class have revealed that: 1. Learning is identified by students as getting the right answer. 2. Learning is disassociated from understanding and explaining. 3. Answers are sought first by recall, not analysis. 4. Considerable time is needed before concepts are considered and even rudimentary analysis is attempted.
Strategies for addressing this situation were considered. It is clear that a learning group alone will not produce highquality thought processes; effective facilitation and intervention are essential. Reflections
Participants reported that the first Stony Brook General Chemistry Teaching Workshop was an enormous success. They described valuable new insights into the teaching/learning process and formulated plans for implementing practical new teaching methods into their classes. Many participants expressed a previously unrecognized appreciation for the importance of process skills, the power of cooperative learning, and the role of assessment in their courses. Representatives of the New Traditions and Workshop Chemistry projects gained potentially valuable new collaborators, and a great deal of cross-fertilization of ideas occurred. A successful model for teaching conferences has been implemented that others should consider. More regional workshops should appear across the country that bring a variety of educational innovators together with teachers who are eager to improve the teaching/learning process in their classrooms. Based on the participant response, another Stony Brook General Chemistry Teaching Workshop will be scheduled for the summer of 1999. For more information, see the postconference Web site, which includes links to other sites including those of conference participants: http://www.chem.sunysb.edu/Hanson-FOC/conferences/gctw4.htm]
Also ask to be put on the conference mailing list by sending an email message to
[email protected]. Acknowledgments
The contributions from Theresa Zielinski, Vicki Roth, Jack Kampmeier, Pratibha Varma-Nelson, David Gosser, and Dan Apple to this report and to making the conference a success are gratefully acknowledged.
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Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 75 No. 2 February 1998 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu Theresa Julia Zielinski Niagara University, Niagara, NY 14109 Earl Peace University of Wisconsin– Madison, WI 53706 Dan Apple Pacific Crest, Corvalis, OR 97330 David Hanson State University of NY, Stony Brook, NY 11794 Pratibha Varma-Nelson St. Xavier University, Chicago, IL 60655 Vicky Roth University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627 Jack Kampmeier University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627 Joe March University of Wisconsin– Madison, WI 53706 Pamela Mills, William Sweeney Hunter College, New York, NY 10021 Sharon Fetzer University of Illinois, Chicago, IL 60637 Jeff Kovac University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996 Beatrice Botch University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003 Troy Wolfskill State University of NY, Stony Brook, NY 11794 Chris Bauer University of NH, Durham, NH 03824 Don DeCoste University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801
What Works, What Doesn’ t, and Why
Strategies to Promote Active Learning Regardless of Class Size
Process Education
Process Workshops in Chemistry
Peer-Led Team Learning
Training Peer Leaders & Graduate Student Instructors for Team Learning
Workshop Organic Chemistry
Guided Discovery Laboratories
Integrating Chemistry, Mathematics, & Physics
Integrating Chemistry & Mathematics: The UI-C MATCH Program
Writing As an Effective Learning Tool in General Chemistry
OWL: Online Web-Based Learning
LUCID: Learning and Understanding through Computer-Based Interactive Discovery
Probing and Challenging Mental Models of Chemical Behavior
Observing Student Interactions in Learning Teams
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] www.chem.sunysb.edu/hanson-foc/lucid.htm
[email protected] owl.chem.umass.edu
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] www.sci.ccny.cuny.edu/~chemwksp/
[email protected] [email protected] journals.springer-ny.com/chedr
[email protected] www.chem.sunysb.edu/hanson-foc/index.htm
[email protected] www.pcrest.com
[email protected] www.chem.wisc.edu/~concept
[email protected] www.niagara.edu/~tjz
Information
aAll session leaders are in the Department of Chemistry at their respective institutions, with the exception of Vicky Roth, who is in Learning Assistance Services.
Session Leadersa
Session
GCTW Program
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