Commentary pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
The New MCAT: An Incentive for Reform or a Lost Opportunity? Melanie M. Cooper* Department of Chemistry, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48864, United States ABSTRACT: The upcoming revised Medical College Admissions Test, based on the recommendations in the HHMI−AAMC report, could be an opportunity to reflect on and revise our curricula, not only for those students who are aiming for a career in the health sciences, but for all students. Unfortunately, the proposed chemistry learning objectives do not seem to provide a coherent framework with which to work. Rather, these objectives are fragments, disconnected ideas, and facts that are clearly parts of existing traditional curricula. If we rely on this report to redesign our courses, it is unlikely that redesign would produce students who understand the core concepts of chemistry. An alternate approach is to use the research on teaching and learning in chemistry to provide us with the evidence and learning theories on which to base curricular redesigns. Learning materials that are designed with an understanding that meaningful learning builds upon and connects to students’ prior knowledge, and that difficult concepts are best developed in a well designed scaffolded framework or learning progression are far more likely to help students develop robust understanding of chemical concepts. KEYWORDS: Second-Year Undergraduate, First-Year Undergraduate/General, Chemical Education Research, Curriculum, Organic Chemistry
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INTRODUCTION The recommendations of the HHMI−AAMC report1 that will be reflected in a new Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) in 2015 have rightly earned the attention of the chemistry education community. A large proportion of the students in the first two years of our chemistry courses are there because their current goals involve preparation for entry into a health field. While it may be tempting (and more satisfying) to treat students in our classes as if they were preparing to become future chemists, it is inappropriate to design large “service” courses as if they were prerequisites to the requirements of the chemistry major curriculum. In fact, over the years, while a number of attempts have been made to reform general and organic chemistry curricula,2−4 unfortunately they have had little overall impact. The inception of the new medical school requirements could and should provide an incentive to redesign our service courses, and in doing so make them more effective and usefulnot only for premedical students, but for all students. If there is one thing that we do know, it is that current approaches to teaching chemistry are often ineffective; many students are simply discouraged by the experience and do not emerge from general or organic chemistry with robust understanding of core ideas or skills.5 The new guidelines could therefore be an excellent opportunity to redesign courses and curricula to make them more engaging and effective. That said, an inspection of the learning outcomes delineated in the HHMI−AAMC report is not particularly helpful to the prospective curriculum reformer. Indeed, it is not entirely clear, either for general or organic chemistry, why the particular outcomes are recommended: certainly no coherent framework for students to build an understanding of chemistry is suggested. It would be a wasted opportunity for reform if we merely embed the suggested outcomes from the report into the existing curriculum, rather than generating a more coherent and effective curriculum. Consider, for example, the competency for entering medical students that most directly pertains to chemistry:1 © 2013 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
Competency E4: Demonstrate knowledge of basic principles of chemistry and some of their applications to the understanding of living systems. This is followed by a set of learning objectives that expand on the competency. For example, under “Demonstrate knowledge of molecular structure” we find:1 Apply theories of ionic bonding and intramolecular covalent bonding built on the principles of electrostatics, hybridization, molecular orbital theory, to explain molecular characteristics such as electronegativity, and bond strengths and angles. While many of the concepts and ideas required to understand molecular structure are listed here, there is no guidance, nor any coherence to the list. The AAMC−HHMI competencies for organic chemistry are similarly vague; for example, the learning outcomes for Competency E4 learning objective 6 include these:1 Recognize major types of functional groups and chemical reactions. Explain how molecular structure and geometry, including chirality, relate to chemical reactivity. Clearly, guidance for any curriculum reform in chemistry will not come from the AAMC−HHMI report; nevertheless, anything we care to teach will almost certainly include the learning objectives outlined. In fact, the report appears to leave us free either to carry on as beforewith perhaps some minor tweaks to include biological examplesor to seize this opportunity to redesign our curriculum in line with theories of learning and with the research base already available.
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LEARNING COMPLEX CONCEPTS IS DIFFICULT While space and scope constraints preclude discussing here all the areas of chemistry covered in the report, because a number of the competencies concern the relationships between structure and properties, it might be helpful to review some of the extant research on these core concepts of chemistry. Clearly, an ability Published: July 9, 2013 820
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each student had a loosely woven tapestry of ideas and skills that were not coherent, and any answer a student might give depended on the prompts used. We also saw, similar to the findings of Talanquer,14 that while students could answer multiple-choice questions based on these ideas, they often used heuristics (rules of thumb) of various kinds rather than applying any kind of conceptual understanding. One thing is clear: with the current typical course structures, even good students are not learning to look at a chemical structure (or a biochemical structure) and predict how that substance will behave. This means that many students, by necessity, must memorize a vast amount of material, rather than understand and predict processes. Although most instructors indicate they teach for understanding (rather than memorization), it is our contention that the very structure of the curriculum makes it quite difficult for students to do this.
to relate the structure of a substance to its properties is important in chemistry, and perhaps even more so given the increased emphasis on biochemistry in the MCAT. We have been studying how students develop these abilities for quite some time, and building upon the work of others6−8 have found that it is a far more complex problem than we had originally envisioned. For example, in our earlier work we recorded and analyzed how students draw Lewis structures. What we found was not encouraging: even for organic chemistry students, the ability to construct structures with more than one carbon atom was quite limited.9 Furthermore, when we asked students what they thought was the purpose of such structures, less than half of them were able to connect structural information to properties of a compound.10 We were at first surprised by this finding, yet if we consider the series of actions and inferences that a student must synthesize to determine what kinds of intermolecular forces are present in a substance, or the kind of reactivity it might show, then this should not be so unexpected. If a student is provided with a common 2D structural representation (e.g., Lewis, or line structures), in order to make inferences they must be able to convert the representation to a 3D structure, complete with bond angles and lone pairs. Then they must determine bond polarities, and add the bond vectors to get molecular polarity (or functional group polarity), and from this they must identify intermolecular forces, which in turn affect physical and chemical properties. These properties are, in turn, affected by students’ understanding of a host of other concepts. This long interconnected series of inferences is difficult for students, and we believe that the structure of traditional chemistry courses makes it even more difficult because the purpose of learning to draw structures is often not immediately and explicitly connected with how the structures are used to determine properties. Students see each step in the process as separate, and are often tested on them separately so that they do not see their overall purpose or value. Such a curriculum does not meet the tenets of meaningful learning,11,12 in which students must have relevant prior knowledge, new material must be explicitly connected to that prior knowledge, and the student must understand (and accept) the value of the new knowledge and chose to learn it meaningfully, rather than in a rote, shallow fashion. It is our contention9 that the traditional approach to teaching structure and properties violates all three of these ideas, and it is not surprising, therefore, when students have great difficulty in learning this material. To get a deeper understanding of the problems students have, we interviewed students in general and organic chemistry, and asked them how they used the structure of a substance to determine properties such as relative phase change temperatures. We found that each student appeared to have a somewhat different approach, and none were able to provide an entirely satisfactory answer.13 (It should be noted that all the students interviewed were good students who had earned either an A or a B grade in their chemistry courses, and that these students scored well above the average percentile on ACS nationally normed examinations.) We found that students’ difficulties appeared to emerge from different sources. Some were unable to draw appropriate structures; for example, they might draw a solid (ethanol) as a 3D network structure. Some had an inappropriate model of phase changes in which they broke bonds, rather than intermolecular forces, when a solid melted or a liquid vaporized. Some did not understand the meaning of many of the chemistry terms they used. For example, some students believed that intermolecular forces operate within a molecule, rather than between distinct molecules. What emerged from our interviews was that
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DIFFICULT CONCEPTS REQUIRE A LEARNING PROGRESSION Taken together, these findings (and those of numerous other researchers5) certainly confirm the need for curriculum reform. We cannot simply blame underprepared or lazy students for these findings, and in fact, ample evidence indicates that the actual structure of our courses is problematic. The question is, can we chemists use the AAMC−HHMI report to help guide our reform efforts? Sadly, the answer to this seems to be “no”. It seems clear that just like the relationship between structure and properties, many chemistry concepts are inherently difficult, and our present traditional approaches are not effective in helping students understand these ideas. As we move forward, it would be a shame to repeat the mistakes of the past and to underestimate the difficulty of what we ask students to do. Instead, we should use approaches that are grounded in theories of learning, and that build on evidence-based practices rather than redesign courses based on the report recommendations, or on personal experiences. One approach that holds great promise is the development of learning progressions to build up to the desired outcomes. Learning progressions15−17 are research-based approaches to helping students develop a sophisticated understanding over time. They build on students’ prior knowledge, connect and scaffold new knowledge as the progressions move toward the ultimate goal: students using the new knowledge to apply to new situations. While there may be multiple alternate, yet equally effective learning progressions for the core concepts in chemistry, we have developed a general chemistry curriculum18 that is based on three interconnected learning progressions: structure, properties, and energy. We have compared equivalent cohorts of students in their understanding of structure−property relationships, and we have found significant improvements for students in the new course.19 We have evidence that this is due not to the instructor, or the use of “active-learning” methods, but rather it is the structure of the curriculum that is explicitly designed to improve core competencies. It is important that departments think very carefully about how they make changes to the curriculum to address changes in the MCAT. We have evidence that we can significantly improve outcomes for students with appropriately designed materials, and we should not choose to ignore the discipline-based education research that indicates how difficult it is to develop a deep understanding. Approaches to curriculum reform that simply cut out material or juggle the order of courses without redesigning them are unlikely to result in robust understanding. While the 821
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AAMC−HHMI report may provide the impetus for change, it does not provide the coherent framework around which change can be designed. For example, while many students may emerge from two years of chemistry able to address some of the AAMC− HHMI learning objectives, such as “recognize major types of functional groups and chemical reactions”, we should not be satisfied if all students can do is recognize functional groups, which is not a high-level task. Surely we want more for our students, and in this light it is important to think carefully about our goals for service courses. These courses should not be a hurdle, or a sorting mechanism for medical schools, or a place to stuff disconnected facts and procedures into students’ heads; rather, our goal should be to provide students with the tools that allow them to use their chemistry knowledge in new and unfamiliar circumstances, and a place where students can develop an appreciation of the central role of chemistry in their lives.
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AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected]. Notes
The authors declare no competing financial interest.
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REFERENCES
(1) AAMC−HHMI Committee. Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians; Association of American Medical Colleges: Washington, DC, 2009. http://www.hhmi.org/grants/pdf/08-209_AAMC-HHMI_ report.pdf (accessed May 2013). (2) Lloyd, B. W.; Spencer, J. N. J. Chem. Educ. 1994, 71, 206−209. (3) Barrow, G. M. J. Chem. Educ. 1999, 76, 158. (4) Ege, S. N.; Coppola, B. P.; Lawton, R. G. J. Chem. Educ. 1997, 74, 74−83. (5) Singer, S. R.; Nielsen, N. R.; Schweingruber, H. A.; Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education; National Research Council. Discipline-Based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering; The National Academies Press: Washington, DC, 2012. (6) Gilbert, J. K.; Treagust, D. F., Eds.; In Multiple Representations in Chemical Education; Springer: Dordrecht, 2009. (7) Nicoll, G. J. Chem. Educ. 2003, 80, 205−213. (8) Teichert, M. A.; Tien, L. T.; Anthony, S.; Rickey, D. Int. J. Sci. Educ. 2008, 30, 1095−1114. (9) Cooper, M. M.; Grove, N.; Underwood, S. M.; Klymkowsky, M. W. J. Chem. Educ. 2010, 87, 869−874. (10) Cooper, M. M.; Underwood, S. M.; Hilley, C. Z. Chem. Educ. Res. Pract. 2012, 13, 195−200. (11) Novak, J. D. A Theory of Education; Cornell University: Ithaca, NY, 1977. (12) Bretz, S. L. J. Chem. Educ. 2001, 78, 1107. (13) Cooper, M. M.; Corley, L.; Underwood, S. M. J. Res. Sci. Teach., in press. (14) Maeyer, J.; Talanquer, V. Sci. Educ. 2010, 94, 963−984. (15) Schwarz, C. V.; Reiser, B. J.; Davis, E. A.; Kenyon, L.; Achér, A.; Fortus, D.; Shwartz, Y.; Hug, B.; Krajcik, J. J. Res. Sci. Teach. 2009, 46, 632−654. (16) Corcoran, T.; Mosher, F. A.; Rogat, A. Learning Progressions in Science: An Evidence-Based Approach to Reform; Consortium for Policy Research in Education and Teachers College; Columbia University: New York, 2009. (17) Duncan, R. G.; Rivet, A. E. Science 2013, 339, 396−397. (18) Cooper, M. M.; Klymkowsky, M. W. Chemistry, Life, the Universe and Everything. http://besocratic.colorado.edu/CLUE-Chemistry/ index.html (accessed May 2013). (19) Cooper, M. M.; Underwood, S. M.; Hilley, C. Z.; Klymkowsky, M. W. J. Chem. Educ. 2012, 89, 1351−1357. 822
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