In the Classroom edited by
NSF Highlights
Susan H. Hixson
Projects Supported by the NSF Division of Undergraduate Education
National Science Foundation Arlington, VA 2230
The New Traditions Consortium: Shifting from a Faculty-Centered Paradigm to a Student-Centered Paradigm
Curtis T. Sears, Jr. Georgia State University Atlanta, GA 30303
Clark R. Landis and G. Earl Peace, Jr. Department of Chemistry, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI 53706 Maureen A. Scharberg and Steve Branz Department of Chemistry, San Jose State University, San Jose, CA 95292-0101 James N. Spencer Department of Chemistry, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA 17604 Robert W. Ricci Department of Chemistry, College of the Holy Cross, Worchester, MA 01610 Susan Arena Zumdahl Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801 David Shaw Madison Area Technical College, Madison, WI 53705
For the last decade strong currents within the education and cognitive sciences communities have pushed forward the perspective that greater student engagement in the learning process will yield more benefits to student learning than changing the formal curricular structure. “…research findings suggest that curricular planning efforts will reap much greater payoffs in terms of student outcomes if we focus less on formal structure and content and put much more emphasis on pedagogy and other features of the delivery system.” Alexander W. Astin What Matters in College: Four Critical Years Revisited
These and other calls for constructivist approaches to learning, increased use of peer instruction to help students achieve authentic learning, new applications of technology to broaden the student experience and focus attention on solving problems and interpreting data, and implementation of guided inquiry approaches require a change in the traditional roles of students and instructors. But how do we create the tools and data that will facilitate a paradigm shift from facultycentered teaching to student-centered learning? The New Traditions Consortium comprises faculty from two-year colleges, liberal arts colleges, comprehensive universities, and research universities who are united by the common goal of effecting paradigm shifts in the chemistry learning experience. The primary sites of New Traditions activity have been Madison Area Technical College, College of the Holy Cross, Franklin and Marshall College, San Jose State University, University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign, and University of Wisconsin–Madison. Individuals from a number of other institutions have contributed. Our approach has been to identify mechanisms of pedagogical/instructional change, implement them at different types of institutions, and evaluate their effects on student learning.
Mechanisms for Change In the planning stages of the New Traditions project, it was pointed out that curricular reform did not require the de novo creation of new learning strategies because a “cottage industry” of individuals were already experimenting with a variety of new pedagogical approaches. What was needed was a method for collecting, implementing, and evaluating these innovations. Our program uses an “adapt-evaluate-adapt” process in a variety of courses and provides tools and mechanisms for others to do the same. By this process we are becoming able to provide faculty with field-tested information about mechanisms available for effecting changes in their teaching, how to implement these mechanisms, the changes they might expect to see in student learning and attitudes, and how they can evaluate the effectiveness of the changes in their own classroom. The mechanisms for change outlined below provide a range of perturbations on traditional lecture-oriented teaching from easily adapted techniques to complete implementation of a guided-inquiry philosophy.
Interactive Lecture Tools: ConcepTests ConcepTests have been widely publicized by Harvard physicist Eric Mazur, who recognized that students who could answer algorithmic questions often were unable to answer simple conceptual questions. Mazur established a library of ConcepTest questions in the physics community. With the support of both the New Traditions and the ChemLinks curricular reform projects, a similar library of chemical ConcepTest questions has been created and is available on the World Wide Web (http://www.chem.wisc.edu/~concept). It is interesting that although there is not widespread agreement among practitioners about what constitutes a ConcepTest, there is unanimous agreement that ConcepTests are valuable because they provide an easily adapted mecha-
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nism for making lectures interactive. Typically, a question is posed and students are asked to think about and then vote on a few possible answers that have been provided. If the responses are split or generally incorrect, the instructor asks the students to try to convince their neighbors which answer is correct. Another vote is taken and the instructor may ask a student who has voted for the correct answer to explain why that choice is best. Thus, ConcepTests provide students with a chance to apply recently developed knowledge, to get immediate feedback on their understanding of a concept, and to engage in knowledge construction through peer instruction. The instructor is provided with immediate assessment of student understanding and an easily incorporated mechanism for actively involving students in the learning process. The New Traditions group recently has completed a videotape on the use and impact of ConcepTests as an interactive lecture tool. It will be distributed through several sources.
Team Problem Solving: Challenge Problems Challenge problems are designed to encourage, or even require, that students work in groups. Challenge problems are often characterized by multiple-part construction and the application of multiple chemistry concepts to complex issues. For example, a challenge question concerning C60 , C70 , and graphite interconversions requires that students integrate the concepts of thermochemistry, structure, bond strain, phase diagrams, mass measurement, NMR, and kinetics to explain observations about distributions of these carbon allotropes under different conditions. Such problems foster group learning because it is common for some students in a group to have a stronger mastery of, say, thermodynamics and for other students to have a stronger mastery of, perhaps, spectroscopy. Students construct a deeper understanding of material because they are actively involved in the construction and because they are communicating in the language of their peers. Challenge problems are easily incorporated into traditional class structures and hence provide an easy entry into student-centered teaching. That entry can become a starting point for more intensive use of the technique in structured settings such as the workshop approaches developed within the Workshop Chemistry curriculum reform project and lectureless courses (see below). The New Traditions project is in the process of creating libraries of Challenge problems and a videotape on their construction and application. The libraries will cover general and organic chemistry. Challenge problems have been or will be published as part of a number of commercial packages: The Chemical World, Saunders; Chemistry: A Guided Inquiry, Wiley; and Chemistry, 4th ed., Chemical Principles, 3rd ed., and Active Learning Guide, all from Houghton-Mifflin. Inquiry-Based/Open-Ended Laboratories Inquiry-based laboratories illustrate the scientific method by including in each laboratory data gathering, data analysis, hypothesis formation, and hypothesis testing. Inquirybased laboratories usually involve students working in groups where each student or pair of students has an assigned role and defined tasks to perform. Open-ended laboratories promote exploration and the application of chemical concepts and laboratory procedures in a way that reflects what scientists actually do. In many cases there are smooth transitions 742
from typical laboratory activities to typical classroom activities and vice versa, especially when appropriate facilities are available. Inquiry-based open-ended laboratories provide a good example of taking innovations developed at small schools, in this case Holy Cross College and Franklin and Marshall Colleges, and testing their adaptation to very different settings— the University of Wisconsin–Madison, San Jose State University, and Madison Area Technical College. Significantly, we found that in most cases it was not necessary to adopt the exact experiments used at Holy Cross. Rather, the changes needed were in the way students were asked to interact with the experiments that had been used traditionally. Thus, incremental change rather than sweeping reform is possible because major laboratory programs can be converted to the philosophy of inquiry-based laboratories without undue expense. However, adapting existing experiments to an inquiry-based philosophy does require an up-front investment of time and changes in the training of laboratory instructors. Inquiry-based and open-ended laboratories have been developed and are in use at Holy Cross, Franklin and Marshall, Madison Area Technical College, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Niagara University that span general chemistry, organic chemistry, and physical chemistry. The experiments developed at the University of Wisconsin have been published in a laboratory manual (Joe L. March and David Shaw, Discovery and Analysis in the Laboratory, Harcourt Brace, Orlando, 1997) and some of the experiments developed at Holy Cross have been published as laboratory separates in the Primis system by McGraw-Hill. “How-to” documents on conversion of existing laboratory experiments to the inquiry-based philosophy will be written in the spring and summer of 1998.
Training for Change: TA Training In institutions that use teaching assistants, student active learning strategies may be undermined if the TA’s are not familiar with the philosophy and strategies of student active learning. Indeed, evaluations of student-active courses at the University of Wisconsin–Madison found that training which did not bring the TAs up to speed with student active learning philosophies weakened the overall effectiveness of student active learning mechanisms. Thus, several institutions within the New Traditions consortium have revamped their TA training methods to better accommodate these new learning strategies. At San Jose State University a special course for TAs has been developed to introduce guided-inquiry skills, peer learning, and cooperative learning techniques. At the University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign, the Merit program for minority students has led to the development of new TA training materials, which are included in the Active Learning Guide by Houghton-Mifflin. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison a new TA training program has been implemented in which expected behaviors of teachers are modeled in the program itself. Weeklong training sessions are highly interactive, cooperative learning strategies are employed, and TAs are encouraged to discover solutions to many of the problems they will face. The UW TA Teaching Workshop manual is modeled after the ChemActivities worksheets used in lectureless courses at Franklin and Marshall. Thematic Teaching Topic-Oriented Approach Another mechanism for actively engaging students in the
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learning process focuses on connecting chemical principles with what students already know. Many students are aware, for example, that carbon fibers and diamond films and fullerenes are emerging technologies. That all of these technologies have their basis in a single element, carbon, is less well known. The context of existing knowledge provides a firm base for the construction of chemical concepts; for the examples of diamonds, graphite, and buckyballs the concepts of elements, atoms, extended solids, molecules, solid-state structure, etc. are needed to understand more deeply these familiar and emerging technologies. The New Traditions project has developed some new modular materials for Buckyballs, Diamond, and Graphite and HIV Protease Inhibitors: An Introduction to Carbonyl Chemistry. These materials will be formatted for inclusion in the modules being developed by the ChemLinks and Modular Chemistry Consortia, which also are funded by NSF Curricular Reform Initiative.
Information Technology/Computer Tools Computers provide new tools for students to explore chemistry, learn techniques, and interact with data. We have addressed three main areas of computer implementation: the use of multimedia for supplementary instruction, interactive texts in which students can experiment with mathematical applications to chemical problems as they read, and laboratoryrelated computing. The New Traditions project has embarked on a major program to develop a multimedia encyclopedia of laboratory techniques and procedures. This project was the result of recommendations by teaching assistants who found that their role as a guide in new inquiry-based laboratories was compromised by time spent addressing routine issues of equipment use and laboratory procedures. The UW Chem Pages have resulted. Approximately 35 modules cover most techniques used in general chemistry; multimedia quizzes are included. These libraries have been submitted to JCE Software for publication. Multimedia is being used to present problems that support integration of concepts by students. In a typical problem, a student will view video clips of chemical reactions or other phenomena and then interact with the problem through a series of carefully paced questions. Students may answer these questions individually or after discussion with a group. Each problem integrates several concepts to help students apply what they are learning to realistic situations. Twenty-four problems have been developed so far. Interactive texts are new student-active tools that have been used extensively in physical chemistry. With interactive texts developed within the Mathcad program, it is possible for students to read a document in which both text and mathematical equations are displayed, as in a traditional text. However, equations, variables, and parameters can be changed, with the results of the new computations being displayed immediately. These interactive texts invite student exploration and take the form of fully developed instructional units that present concepts interactively. A Web site of more than 35 interactive texts has been established by Theresa Zielinski (http://www.monmouth.edu/~tzielins/mathcad/index.htm). Ongoing work will lead to a collection of more than 75 documents that cover most of the major conceptual areas in physical chemistry, and the Web site will become a regular feature in JCE Online+.
Lectureless Courses and Laboratory-Driven Curricula As one moves along the continuum of instructional techniques, lectureless courses and lab-driven curricula based on the principles of guided inquiry represent the most complete adoption of the student-centered learning philosophy. The New Traditions project has supported the development of lectureless approaches at Franklin and Marshall College and laboratory-driven curriculum at College of the Holy Cross. These two programs have experienced significant crossfertilization; for example, the Holy Cross guided-inquiry experiments are used at Franklin and Marshall. These courses are in place and cover general chemistry through physical chemistry. The fundamental idea of these approaches is that students must wrestle with the subject matter and construct their own understanding. “Classroom” mechanisms for achieving this type of learning include the use of guided-inquiry worksheets and laboratories, an emphasis on cooperative learning, and elimination of lecture with the instructor adopting the role of a learning facilitator. In laboratory-driven curriculum, the classroom and laboratory aspects of chemistry are seamlessly interwoven in both content and time. Supporting materials for the implementation of fully guided-inquiry-based courses that cover general through physical chemistry soon will be complete and available for distribution. Blended Courses At San Jose State University and the College of the Holy Cross, the New Traditions project is supporting the development of a new course sequence based on a spiral curriculum. The course sequence discards the notion that general chemistry and organic chemistry are pedagogically distinct and replaces the normal two-year sequence with a four-semester blended course sequence. Covering both general and organic chemistry topics, the new two-year sequence establishes key concepts quickly and then revisits these concepts periodically and in different contexts. The result of this spiral curriculum is that students are exposed to chemistry in a highly interconnected way: chemical principles are presented repetitively, with increasing sophistication and in the context of different traditional areas. Thus barriers between general and organic chemistry are torn down as students see that the same principles apply to both areas. In keeping with the student active philosophy of the New Traditions project, this experimental curriculum makes extensive use of active- and cooperativelearning techniques in both classroom and laboratory. Learning Communities/Course Clusters Student active learning flourishes when similar learning experiences are shared among a group of familiar cohorts. Learning communities—which consist of a medium-sized group of students who are coenrolled in the same section or sections of large classes and study together, interact socially, and may live in the same campus housing—provide the structure for bringing learners together. The New Traditions model also includes course clustering, in which students are coenrolled in the same sections for two or more large lecture courses. Course clustering provides natural opportunities for cross-disciplinary integration of content and pedagogy. So far, implementations of learning communities and course clusters within the New Traditions project have focused on large Universities (University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign and
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the University of Wisconsin–Madison). They have taken a variety of forms, with communities focusing on women in sciences, minorities, engineering majors, preservice teachers, and freshman coenrolled in chemistry, calculus, and psychology. To date the project has had a cumulative enrollment of 400 student-semesters. Evaluation At its heart, the New Traditions project aims to provide instructors with new instructional degrees of freedom based on an active-learner model and documented data describing what changes might be expected as a result of incorporating active-learning techniques. Evaluation of the New Traditions project has spanned a variety of student outcomes including performance-based, affective, and retention outcomes. In many cases the evaluation model has gone deeper to investigate the learning process itself—uncovering what is going on in the classroom, laboratory, and outside of class that is facilitating or hindering learning. Important gains in student learning, such as the ability to effectively communicate how chemical principles may be applied to a real world problem, are not measured well by standardized multiple-choice exams. Therefore, the New Traditions project evaluation has required the creation of new evaluation techniques. For example, a comparative evaluation of two classes at the University of Wisconsin–Madison employed faculty assessors who interviewed eight students, four from each class, individually for about 30 minutes each. These students were force-ranked and then the results of all assessors were compared. In this instance, the assessors perceived significant differences in the students who had taken the class with an active learning emphasis and, with statistical significance, ranked their performance more favorably. The New Traditions project is supporting the development of a database, Field-Tested Learning Assessment Guide (FLAG), of assessment tools. This will result in the production of a broad-based toolkit of assessment resources for science, math, and engineering instructors and evaluators. The New Traditions project has worked closely with the ACS Exams Institute to produce blended conceptual/traditional exams, the “First- Term and Second-Term General Chemistry Special Examinations”. What can one expect to gain from incorporating active learning strategies in the classroom? Although the evaluation of the New Traditions model courses is incomplete, some general effects of active-learning strategies are becoming clear. Attendance at class increases when students are actively involved in constructing knowledge. Perhaps relatedly, students are less likely to withdraw or fail when the course actively involves them in the learning process: it is not uncommon to see student attrition rates change by 50% or more as a result of active learning strategies. Active learning will not necessarily change students’ scores on standardized exams. However, oral assessments of performance consistently yield higher rankings for students who have had a strong active learning experience. Learning communities effectively shrink the students’ perception of the size of the University and support improved performance. Dissemination and Future Plans A wide variety of instructional materials, instructor training aids, evaluation designs and reports, journal articles, and 744
workshop activities are currently in production and will be the focus of our future work. The Internet is an effective dissemination vehicle. Current offerings on the WWW include ChemPages laboratory materials, ConcepTests database (jointly maintained with the ChemLinks consortium), Mathcad Interactive texts database, and the recently initiated FLAG Web site of assessment materials. Our plan is for the ChemPages and Mathcad documents to eventually become available through the Journal of Chemical Education Software. Instructional materials that have been, or soon will be, published include the Holy Cross Inquiry-Based Laboratory Experiments for general and organic chemistry (available through the McGraw-Hill Primis system); new materials for physical chemistry are ready for publication. The Franklin and Marshall ChemActivities worksheets and textbooks for general chemistry are available from Wiley & Sons; new materials for physical and organic chemistry will be available in the next two years. The New Traditions adaptation of laboratories to a guided-inquiry philosophy have been published through Harcourt-Brace. ConcepTests and Challenge Problems have been incorporated into the second edition of The Chemical World text and study guide, published by Saunders. Books from Houghton-Mifflin that incorporate Challenge Problems include Chemistry, 4th edition, and Chemical Principles, 3rd edition. Topic-oriented modules on Buckyballs, Diamond, and Graphite and HIV Protease Inhibitors will be submitted for publication through the ChemLinks and MC2 consortia. A series of How-To aids for instructors are under development. We have recently completed a 30-minute videotape on the impact of ConcepTests, which will be accompanied by a short booklet on the construction and implementation of ConcepTests. These materials will be distributed by Prentice Hall at little or no cost. Similar How-To documents are planned for creating and using inquiry-based labs, challenge problems, and new assessment techniques. For institutions that use teaching assistants, more active learning-based courses require different methods of TA training, as the TAs themselves may never have experienced active learning methods. An Active Learning Guide from the University of Illinois–UrbanaChampaign will include material on training others to use active learning in the classroom and will be published by Houghton-Mifflin. We have initiated a series of workshops on incorporating the New Traditions mechanisms for change into chemistry courses. Three workshops aimed at two-year college faculty have been given. We have pioneered two very successful model workshops directed at new tenure-track faculty. In these workshops a new faculty member is paired with at least one experienced faculty member from the same institution. Other workshops are now being planned for 1998 and 1999. For more information about the New Traditions Project, contact our Web site: http://newtraditions.chem.wisc.edu/. Acknowledgment This work is partially supported by the National Science Foundation, Division of Undergraduate Education, Systemic Changes in the Undergraduate Chemistry Curriculum initiative under award DUE-9455928; co-PIs John W. Moore and Clark Landis.
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