What and How Much is learned
It is doubtful that many college chemistry teachers have much, if any, idea of what (in its broadest sense) or how much is learned by students in the courses they teach. To be sure, most teachers have a reasonably reliable view of what students have not learned and possibly of how effectively students can match the instructor's expectations in a few carefully controlled situations. But even the most knowing of teachers would he hard-put to spell out with any confidence the breadth and depth of the changes in the behavior potential of students which result from their struggling with a course in chemistry. Without attempting to he smug or polemical, we helieve that a strong case can be made for the position that, in general, the students who enroll in introductory college chemistry classes are considerably further ahead in their ability to understand chemistry than in their ability to write or to handle elementary mathematics. If true, this obviously can be interpreted in many ways. Nevertheless, it would bn difficult to escape the thought that the elementary and secondary school science pmgrams are somewhat more wccessful than they generally are conceded to be. Because of the many similarities in content and objectives between secondary school and introductory college courses, this leads to the hope that perhaps the college level courses are providing a good deal more thau most of their critics and many of their adherents believe. On the other side of this coin, however, is the welldocumented declinein interest in science. But given the passions and problems of our times, this need not he interpreted as a failure of the college courses to furnish rich and valuable learning experiences. What appears to be important here is that while the full extent of the scope and effectiveness of the learning in college chemistry courses is not really known-and can never he known completely-there is good reason to look more carefully at this aspect of our work. One way to do this is to identify what psychologists have called behavioral objectives for the courses and to determine whether or not a student acquires these desired behaviors during his involvement in a course. For a few truly exceptional teachers there may be less here than meets the eye; for a good fraction of others, describing the course content in terms of observable and measurable objectives of student performance has been a career-long standard operating procedure. Experience suggests that this approach has unusual potential for improving the quality of courses and the understanding of teachers and students relative to the learning process.
speaking
At the heart of the behavioral objectives concept is the idea that the student should he changed by his participation in a course. This change should he demonstrable in terms of behaviors-different for those who have taken the course than for those who have not. The learner should be made aware of what it is he is expected to demonstrate and of the minimum quality of performance that will he acceptable. Each course-indeed, the entire curriculum-consists of a hierarchy of behavioral objectives with each objective related to others in the hierarchy in terms of its dependency on or its being a prerequisite for them. The simplicity of this scheme, its palpability and its naivet6 (the latter two qualities are certain to be an affront to a great many dedicated teachers) belie its power and its great potential. A little thought will reveal some of its virtues, a little imagination will illustrate some of its challenges. The behavioral objectives approach has been applied with success to chemistfy courses a t the secondary school and at the college level. An entire undergraduate chemistry curriculum rigorously structured in this way is now in its third year of operation. The staff of a large secondary school which uses this approach with about three hundred college preparatory students has found that forty to fifty percent of the students do not meet the minimum standards for achieving the objectives in more than half the chapter topics of a wellknown secondary school chemistry text. While this could he interpreted as a failure of the behavioral objectives system or in terms of unrealistic attitudes on the part of the staff, a more reasonable interpretation under the circumstances is that a great many students simply cannot learn to handle some of the concepts that are presented in the textbook in the time that ordinarily is given to them. If the behavioral objectives concept could do no more thau tell us this about our courses it would serve a most valuable function. Every evidence points to the notion that the next great student crusade will he directed toward the courses, their content, relevancy, teaching, and grading. If this occurs, the students will ask some of the same hard questions on teaching and Iearning that we have asked of ourselves over the years. The main difference is that the students will expect answers. And we will want to provide them. Perhaps if we start now to find some of these answers, we can all feel better about the whole problem of what and how much of it is learned in our courses. WTL
Volume 46, Number 1 1 , November 1969
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