Sunday, March 18, 2018
CHED 37 Diane Bunce, What makes a "C" student a "C" student? What are the differences between "A/B" students and "D/F" students? Research at the US Naval Academy (USNA) reveals that general chemistry students who get "Cs" know they should be using deep study but they haven't yet fully mastered the deep study approach. "A/B" students use deep study and "D/F" students use surface study. A second study at the USNA found that "A/B" students look at solved problems in the text (self-help, individual) while "D/F" students use peer learning facilitators (PLF) and tutors (help from other people, cooperative).
ACS Board of Directors Meeting There is an ACS Scholars Program which awards renewable scholarships to underrepresented minority (URM) students majoring in undergraduate chemistry-related disciplines, and are also intending to pursue careers in chemistry-related fields. Selected recipients are awarded up to $5,000* per academic year. To date, over 3,000 students have received a funding from the ACS Scholars Program.#ACSNOLA Nontraditional Careers for Scientists: thinking outside the beaker by Lisa M. Balbes #scicomm pic.twitter.com/9gnrfVyGHC— CSUN ChemClub (@CSUNchemclub) March 18, 2018
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/funding-and-awards/scholarships/acsscholars.html
Keynote Speaker Lisa Balbes "Nontraditional Careers for Chemists: Thinking Outside the Beaker" Lisa started out by presenting some data: in one year there are 2704 PhDs awarded in but only 501 faculty positions available. There are a range of careers besides academia. Further, doing a post-doc is only useful if you are planning a career in academia. Doing a PhD in the chemical sciences teaches time management, ability to learn quickly, ability to manage a project that are transferable skills for careers outside of academia. Lisa showed a Chord, a cross between a bar chart and a flow diagram, showing the size and links between various categories. US Census data from the 2012 American Community Survey looked at which US college major subjects are commonly associated with employees in STEM jobs. The graph here shows that a minority of students who graduate with a STEM major end up working in a STEM occupation. The majority of STEM graduates end up in occupations such as management, health care, education, sales, business, legal, etc.The good thing about attending the Board of Directors Meeting is that you get an overview of the conference and that can give you ideas of what you want to see. I learned about the session PRES: Science Cafes & Engaging the Public: Techniques for Hosting Successful Events. After we checked into our hotel, we came back to the convention center and I went to see
PRES 7 Science Cafes & Engaging the Public: Techniques for Hosting Successful Events by Pete Joseph Bonk, the session co-presider representing the Rhode Island ACS local section. He gave us some guidelines for planning events. (1) create a 45 minute presentation. Keep your talk on science. Tell them what we know, how well we know it, how do we know, what are the known unknowns, what are possible unknown unknowns, what are common misconceptions, what are our assumptions, are there any complications? Show humility. Avoid projections & predictions. Use unbiased sources (not news articles). Challenge your audience, don't avoid complexity. The audience has come to learn and they will trust you to inform them, you are an expert. This talk will be a basis for part (2) a large-group discussion. The total event is 2 hours, so allow for significant participation in the second part of the event. You function as a moderator, not a director, of the conversation. Above all, show your enthusiasm and have fun! Advertise your events on facebook, via email and using fliers/postcards.
PRES 8 From science cafes to a state-wide STEAM festival by Preston John and Tara A. MacDougall. In 5 years, they hosted 11 science cafes at their Discovery Center (science museum). Lessons learned: props and demos are essential, get experienced speakers, coach your speaker on what to focus on (takaways and problem solving strategies), involve the Boys & Girls club to be inclusive of diversity, use hot topics (e.g. bioengineered mosquitos to fight Zika virus), make the event two-way engagement (get volunteers to participate, do not just lecture). There is a Science Festival Alliance at MIT that can provide you training. They have a 5 year plan to create a non-profit so that the STEAM festival can become self sustaining. Currently they rely on corporate donations in $10,000 increments. The total cost of the festival exceeded $300k. With corporate partners, they can use the event to recruit the workforce of the future (e.g. Schwann cosmetic company that has trouble finding workers). Including the arts allowed for involvement of the country music hall of fame, kids made Jason Aldean style hats out of paper. Also there was a video contest with a GoPro as a prize where kids used innovative instruments to play a B# note. Video entries were tagged with #besharp
HIST 14 "Food at the Crossroads: Chemistry's Role in Sustainability, Past & Present" This is pretty much the only talk I went to that would qualify for being at the "Nexus of Food, Energy & Water" and I didn't even stay very long, but it was at least tangentially related to my passion for gardening and the experiment we do in our second analytical chemistry course about scoville heat units of a habanero.
Senior editor @cenmag Rick Mullin sharing #HIST chemical/botanical history of chili peppers #ACSNOLA https://t.co/O4tYnuxsjn Wilbur Scoville taste scale from 0 to 16M— Kayla A. Kaiser (@hamerk02) March 18, 2018
PRES 9 "Brewing Chemistry” in Detroit: Maintaining a long running Science Café by Meghann N Murray. Her website is here. There's funding for these events here. The ACS Committee on Local Section Activities (LSAC) funds new local section projects through Local Section Innovative Projects Grants (IPGs). Application deadlines occur twice yearly: January 31 and June 30.
At my poster (CHED 160) I got to catch up with my BFF Cheri (Barta) Rossi.
CHED 237 Amanda Holton from UC Irvine presented her work on active learning in massive lecture courses. I met her last year at the Collaborative Chemistry Conference in Oxnard, CA.
Monday, March 19, 2018
CHED 237 Amanda Holton from UC Irvine presented her work on active learning in massive lecture courses. I met her last year at the Collaborative Chemistry Conference in Oxnard, CA.
CHED 253 Justin Carmel at Florida International University studied students' ability to (1) engage arguments from evidence (2) plan and do experiments (3) analyze and interpret data and (4) construct explanations. Students were given two graphs, see below, and asked "What if anything can you say about this data? Can you make a conclusion?" He found that students agreed that the left graph was inconclusive, but that students tended to make a conclusion from the graph on the right.
He also had some cool assessment based on Rhodamine. He showed students a UV-Vis absorbance spectrum and asked them "Based on this analysis, do you believe it? What are the similarities and differences? What would the solution look like based on the absorbance spectrum?" A third activity was based on Phlogiston theory. Data was presented to students (burning magnesium, forming magnesium oxide) and students were asked to explain their reasoning using Phlogiston theory (or not).
CHED 254 Dulani Samarasekara from Mississippi State University presented data evaluating designed laboratory partnerships. Her groups were (A) free choice (B) random (C) side to side (D) high-low and (E) cohort. The side-to-side partnerships were where the ACT math score was similar between partners and the high-low partnerships were where one person in the group had a higher ACT math score than the other. The model inputs were post-lab critical thinking questions, survey attitudes, and lecture course final exam grade. Groups (4) and (5) had the highest cooperation based on survey data, while group (4) had the highest average final exam score. This is two semesters worth of on-sequence general chemistry (FA12 and FA13) with N = 1400ish. Group (4) enjoyed the partnerships the most. Future work will examine the effect of gender and ethnicity. The audience member asked if she conducted any face-to-face interviews.
CHED 240 Nawaporn Sanguantrakun from St. Louis College of Pharmacy measured the effects of active learning and flipped classroom on the success of students enrolled in a two year integrated chemistry sequence. She used POGIL and PollEv to create the active classroom environment. A set of 3 cups was used to indicate whether a group was (Green) no problem, in progress (Red) stuck, need help or (Gold) finished, ready to move on. This is how she managed the dynamic classroom environment with a large enrollment. She provided students a team checklist to manage behavior and to allow students to evaluate their teammates (turn around, participate, focus, etc.). She also found that assigning team roles formally, as suggested by Moog, was better. There were team presentations for share-out. A reflection sheet was also used and collected for points. Her grading scheme overall was 60% cumulative exam, 25% midterms, 10% in class activity (3% quiz, 4% POGIL, 3% PollEv), and 5% outside class activity (supplemental instruction, office hours, review session). Her in-class lectures were 5-10 minutes long and interactive (or maybe that was the outside class video, IDK).
CHED 242 Monica Illies from Drexel University spoke about assigning a "Study Buddy" to students in her general chemistry (freshmen) and introduction to medicinal chemistry (seniors). She found via survey that her students were not valuing employer-desired skills such as teamwork. Her "pedagogic composite strategy" involved (1) think-pair-share (2) metacognition (3) feedback. She used flipped classroom, muddiest point, clickers, tie-ins to content from her students' concurrently enrolled courses, awarding participation points, and handwritten feedback. She teaches the "Study Cycle" as recommended by Saundra McGuire. She found that her freshmen were focused on reproducing/imitating the professor, they were motivated by GPA, and they considered feedback as criticism. By contrast her seniors were focused on being original, they were motivated by career readiness, and they perceived feedback as help. A big take-home point for me was that teamwork helped students avoid "the illusion of knowing" that can be associated with studying from a book.
CHED 244 Kalyn Shea Owens, a chemist, together with Ann Murkowski, a biologist, from North Seattle College have developed a set of interdisciplinary investigations (IDIs) with funding from NSF DUE. Three examples of projects involve (1) aquaporin for water purification (2) epigenetics to teach hybridization (3) hemoglobin to teach thermodynamics. These projects engage biology, engineering and public health majors. The model they follow is: connect --> extend --> challenge. The IDIs involve students reading primary literature and collaboration. The first week students generate a drawing (model) and teachers give a mini lecture. The second week students give seminars. They tell students "Your model does not need to be correct, just well supported!" A rubric instructs that students' model should utilize 2+ disciplines and communicate clearly. They discussed threshold concepts in biochemistry. Specifically intermolecular forces.
CHED 319 Charlie Cox from Stanford University uses active learning in his TA training workshop. Stanford has 40-50 incoming graduate students to train, so they match 5 trainees with 1 experienced TA. Three days (8h/day) prior to the start of the semester are used (1) policy = honor code, sexual harassment (2) safety = manifolds, ppe, spills, fires (3) teaching = office hours, problem solving, microteach, prelab lecture. Day 3 format is that new grad students give their microteach, receive feedback, eat lunch, then present an improved version of their microteach. The TA training itself uses clickers and discussions to avoid "death by powerpoint." They pay experienced TAs $500 to facilitate. The Mentors in Teaching (MinT) program extends the 3 day training into a semester (1) goal setting (2) midquarter evals (3) observation (4) end of quarter wrap up. The overall goal is to create a welcoming environment, NOT a scary experience. Presiding over this session was Rebecca Kissling, the chemistry undergraduate advisor at Binghamton University, SUNY.
CHED 290 David Cartrette from South Dakota State University spoke in the session titled "ACS Award for Achievement in Research for Teaching & Learning of Chemistry" discussing a course developed jointly with an art teacher. He followed STEMtoSTEAM.org from Rhode Island School of Design. Scientists with creative hobbies (such as music, literature, art) are 1.7x more likely to be members of the National Academy of Sciences, 1.8x more likely to be members of the Royal Society, and 2.8x more likely to be Nobel laureates. The course they developed had a 400-level designation and enrollment with half art students and half chemistry & biochemistry majors. It was populated with first-semester freshmen (FTF). It came with an honors designation. First, they deconstructed stereotypes of artists and scientists, encouraged students to focus on their common creative process (concept, trial & error, problem-solving, discovery, final approach). They presented students with an image and used Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) as a framework to discuss that art can mean something different to each individual (see and discuss). Students were tasked with creating a public installation which required them to think: Who is the audience? How many people pass by? What is an appropriate scale? They settled on a kinetic sculpture in the student union.
CHED 330 Jack Eichler from University of California, Riverside used Active and Blended LEarning (ABLE) in general chemistry funded by NSF IUSE. A publication from The Coalition for Reform of Undergraduate STEM Education motivated his use of flipped classroom. A concept inventory revealed that peer instruction improves student performance. Best Practices for Flipped Classroom include (1) online pre-class videos with interactive questions (2) online pre-class simulations that are interactive. These must be mandatory! (aka. worth points). Then (3) the class time should be used for problem-based learning involving case-inspired real-world issues such as sustainability and renewable fuels. Eichler combined studio-produced videos with screencapture using the playpauseit software. For simulations, he used mathematicaCDF, Norton ChemTours, and PhET sims. A quiz through the learning management system (LMS) is an effective way to gauge student progress. Worksheets with open-ended questions were graded and returned. Eichler had undergraduate SI leaders and graduate TAs attend lecture. He lowered the DFW rate from 15% to 5%. He also used ALEKS for homework. Using a responsive approach, flipped classrooms together with collaborative discussion was found to be better than collaborative discussion alone.
CHED 331 Overtoun Jenda led the "Making to Advance Knowledge, Excellence and Recognition in STEM (MAKERS)" program in Alabama, which was an alliance between community colleges and universities. The goals of this program are to improve the graduation rate, lower the DFW rate, and get more people in the pipeline for STEM careers. Freshman-sophomore pairings focused on time management, study skills and academic resources. Junior-senior pairings focused on summer internships, GRE preparation, choosing a graduate school and writing. The program components that were deemed mandatory were: check your school email, attend all meetings, maintain a 3.0 GPA and full-time student status, attend workshops and summer programs. The issues were that obtaining an IRB for a multi-institution project was an absolute nightmare. NSF funding is great but you can't start the project without the IRB. His advice: choose faculty who love working with students, not just those who love getting grant money. It was hard to recruit students due to fluidity of community college population.
CHED 293 Amy Phelps from Middle Tennessee described the differences between wet labs and virtual labs. She found that in a wet lab, students talked about the procedure (and complained about missing and broken equipment) whereas in virtual lab students discussed the concepts and theory. **If students in CHEM 102 @ CSUN work in pairs for the VLabs, they may work better** Students who did the virtual lab tended to learn the micro and symbolic aspects better, whereas students who did the wet lab learned the macro aspects better. So it seems they are both good because students who did the virtual lab didn't learn the macro aspect and students who did the wet lab could not articulate symbolic or micro level understanding.
CHED 334 Marion A Franks from Virginia Tech spoke about his "Emporium" style general chemistry course. The shift in pedagogy was due to the fact that 89% of students were scoring below 40% on the ACS gen chem exam and only 3% of the students scored above the 50% benchmark. The emporium is a staffed 24h/day computer lab for students to use ALEKS. They found a decrease in DFW rate, an increase in the number of ALEKS topics mastered, and an increase on the score on the ACS exam. The peer tutors working in the emporium attend lecture and work through ALEKS. The emporium group had 2 lectures per week and 2 class meetings in the emporium whereas the control group had 3 lectures per week and a traditional recitation.
| test | control | test | control | test | control | ||
| 52 | 71 | 65 | 20 | 47 | 40 | ||
| 47 | 54 | 70 | 65 | 60 | 57 | ||
| 36 | 62 | 75 | 58 | 41 | 36 | ||
| DFW | rate | ALEKS | topics | ACS | Exam |
CHED 1796-1800 "STRETCH your students' minds using materials to engineer ideas about water, food and energy in the chemistry classroom," a make-and-take session.
CHED 1870 "Pasadena City College (PCC) Chemistry Club" saw Veronica Jaramillo and had a great coffee talk with her the next day.
Mississippi State Alumni and Friends Reception at Mulate's the original Cajun restaurant. Found out that they are hiring 5 faculty without any restrictions on the discipline. A great place to solve a "two-body problem."
CHED 1929 Lance Shipman Young at Morehouse College spoke about Peer-Lead Team Learning (PLTL) and his conclusions were that you need (1) an "Army of the Committed" so that if some faculty or administrators leave the program will survive (2) creative funding sources, they get $12,000 per year in donation from Corning (3) and willing open-minded faculty and deans. At his school, the program actually went on a 2-3 year hiatus due to a lack of these three items, but it's revived now.
CHED 1930 Rick Moog spoke about POGIL, PLTL and Pratibha. In a talk from 2005 they were using student-centered pedagogic approaches including process-oriented guided inquiry learning (POGIL) and peer-led guided inquiry (PGLI), physical chemistry online (PCOL), problem-based learning (PBL), calibrated peer review (CPR), and just in time teaching (JITT) so these ideas are hardly new.
CHED 1940 Allison Caster from Colorado School of Mines spoke about how and why she converted general chemistry in large traditional lecture sections (250 students) to smaller class size (50 students) with active learning. Using a pre- and post-test in the traditional lecture revealed that students were coming out of the class with misconceptions and poor mastery of the material. Also, there was a 20% DFW rate. The 4 Pillars that support their work are (1) learning by doing (2) finding relevance (3) communicating (4) scaffolding = start with what they know. They noted that it can be overwhelming to implement active learning given the array of techniques in the literature. Leading students to an impasse is critical. They used whiteboards and authored (or borrowed) 60+ activities. They used the science writing heuristic (SWH). There are lots of resources here. With a class size of 263 students they were able to lower the DFW from 25% to 15%. They saw a bump in attendance from 70% to 95% even though the worksheets were worth a small amount of points. Students recognized that attending class was of value. They did intentional grouping and also allowed groups to reshuffle throughout the semester.
CHED 1941 Kimberly Linenberger Cortes from Kennesaw State University in Georgia spoke about her Fall 2016 Science & Math majors cohort. The students took chem lecture and lab as well as math class and freshman seminar together. She used GoFormative and iClicker for daily group quizzes (analogous to learning catalytics). POGIL and ChemSource were the resources for in-class activities. ChemQuest and PhET were used for simulations. Camtasia was used for flipping the classroom, with embedded quizzes in the videos. The barriers to implementation were: PLTL facilitators and rooms. Also, it was difficult to get faculty to adopt high-tech video production. Her framework was Model-Based Inquiry (MBI) which (1) anchors (2) presents initial ideas (3) engages students in an activity (4) revisits hypothesis. The activities intentionally created cognitive dissonance. Labs were paired with simulations. The learning community was found to decrease the DFW rate. The flipped classroom environment was appreciated by freshmen but a more difficult adjustment for nontraditional students. Examples of her activities were flame tests, legos for dilution, and a FlinnSci activity on paramagnetism.
CHED 1943 Scott Lewis at the University of South Florida spoke about flipped classroom and PLTL in the second semester of general chemistry. He used measurable linked content (MLC). He created 47 instructional videos together with a team of 3 people. They have an upper level chemistry course that is PLTL training. Using class-level data over 8 sections, he found that the following deviations from the mean:
The advantages to his approach is that it is scalable, covers the same content and presents a minimal cost to students. His future work involves longitudinal tracking of his former students and PLTL facilitators in analytical chemistry.
CHED 1870 "Pasadena City College (PCC) Chemistry Club" saw Veronica Jaramillo and had a great coffee talk with her the next day.
Mississippi State Alumni and Friends Reception at Mulate's the original Cajun restaurant. Found out that they are hiring 5 faculty without any restrictions on the discipline. A great place to solve a "two-body problem."
Tuesday, March 20, 2018
CHED 1929 Lance Shipman Young at Morehouse College spoke about Peer-Lead Team Learning (PLTL) and his conclusions were that you need (1) an "Army of the Committed" so that if some faculty or administrators leave the program will survive (2) creative funding sources, they get $12,000 per year in donation from Corning (3) and willing open-minded faculty and deans. At his school, the program actually went on a 2-3 year hiatus due to a lack of these three items, but it's revived now.
CHED 1930 Rick Moog spoke about POGIL, PLTL and Pratibha. In a talk from 2005 they were using student-centered pedagogic approaches including process-oriented guided inquiry learning (POGIL) and peer-led guided inquiry (PGLI), physical chemistry online (PCOL), problem-based learning (PBL), calibrated peer review (CPR), and just in time teaching (JITT) so these ideas are hardly new.
CHED 1940 Allison Caster from Colorado School of Mines spoke about how and why she converted general chemistry in large traditional lecture sections (250 students) to smaller class size (50 students) with active learning. Using a pre- and post-test in the traditional lecture revealed that students were coming out of the class with misconceptions and poor mastery of the material. Also, there was a 20% DFW rate. The 4 Pillars that support their work are (1) learning by doing (2) finding relevance (3) communicating (4) scaffolding = start with what they know. They noted that it can be overwhelming to implement active learning given the array of techniques in the literature. Leading students to an impasse is critical. They used whiteboards and authored (or borrowed) 60+ activities. They used the science writing heuristic (SWH). There are lots of resources here. With a class size of 263 students they were able to lower the DFW from 25% to 15%. They saw a bump in attendance from 70% to 95% even though the worksheets were worth a small amount of points. Students recognized that attending class was of value. They did intentional grouping and also allowed groups to reshuffle throughout the semester.
CHED 1941 Kimberly Linenberger Cortes from Kennesaw State University in Georgia spoke about her Fall 2016 Science & Math majors cohort. The students took chem lecture and lab as well as math class and freshman seminar together. She used GoFormative and iClicker for daily group quizzes (analogous to learning catalytics). POGIL and ChemSource were the resources for in-class activities. ChemQuest and PhET were used for simulations. Camtasia was used for flipping the classroom, with embedded quizzes in the videos. The barriers to implementation were: PLTL facilitators and rooms. Also, it was difficult to get faculty to adopt high-tech video production. Her framework was Model-Based Inquiry (MBI) which (1) anchors (2) presents initial ideas (3) engages students in an activity (4) revisits hypothesis. The activities intentionally created cognitive dissonance. Labs were paired with simulations. The learning community was found to decrease the DFW rate. The flipped classroom environment was appreciated by freshmen but a more difficult adjustment for nontraditional students. Examples of her activities were flame tests, legos for dilution, and a FlinnSci activity on paramagnetism.
CHED 1943 Scott Lewis at the University of South Florida spoke about flipped classroom and PLTL in the second semester of general chemistry. He used measurable linked content (MLC). He created 47 instructional videos together with a team of 3 people. They have an upper level chemistry course that is PLTL training. Using class-level data over 8 sections, he found that the following deviations from the mean:
| flipped | traditional | p value | |
| midterm | +0.25 | -0.31 | 0.003 |
| final | +0.16 | -0.18 | 0.008 |
The advantages to his approach is that it is scalable, covers the same content and presents a minimal cost to students. His future work involves longitudinal tracking of his former students and PLTL facilitators in analytical chemistry.
CHED 1944 Drew Meyer from Case Western Reserve in Ohio described several semesters worth of data where he used ALEKS, clickers and POGIL-like active learning in 40% of his lectures. Twice he also used pre-lecture videos. He had a large class (300 students) and a small class (45 students). Best practices dictate that if you plan to do active learning, you must begin on day 1. If you have a theater-style classroom, make a seating chart that leaves some rows open for you to move through the room. The pre-lecture videos get everyone on the same base of knowledge and a start-of-class quiz gets them there on time. He used Camtasia for his videos, no more than 10 minutes each. He measured students' attitudes toward chemistry.
CHED 1967 David Malik from Indianapolis University presented data on the success of ALEKS and PLTL on lowering the DFW rate from 40% to below 20%. He emphasized that remedial courses hinder student progress and decrease the graduation rate. Many students get stuck and never finish.
CHED 1968 Bobby Kunnath from Syracuse University in New York spoke about his experience with bridging high school and university. He is a high school math teacher plagued with students constantly asking why they need to learn math. He found chemistry is the perfect way to show students exactly why they need math skills. Also being an immigrant, he is sensitive to the communities of refugees from Congo, Somalia, Nepal, Burma, Yemen, Sudan, and Vietnam that can be found in New York. He reported that 80% of his students qualify for free or reduced lunch. The experience he provides for them ranges from 6 weeks to 1 year where students shadow and then do hands-on experiments to receive a $250 stipend when they turn in a reflective essay. This made me wonder: Why can't the chemistry placement test (CPT) be a part of Freshman Orientation? We already require a math and writing placement exam.
CHED 1969 Ranier Glaser from University of Missouri discussed his recent publication wherein he taught spectral deconvolution using Excel in a course about how to do science. A take-home point of his talk was that "If the essence of science is peer review, then we're not teaching science if we're not doing peer review." And also "The idea that scientists are objective is a myth. They're ego driven, especially the successful ones. Peer review constrains the egos. Arguments are necessary. Peer review is a way of communication." You can find more about this course here: Undergraduate Seminar in Chemistry (3).New Curriculum on Scientific Writing, Peer Review, Science Communication. Writing-Intensive. Methods for reading, locating and presenting chemical information; data management, presentation and analysis; scientific writing; scientific peer review; professional ethics.
CHED 2015 Emily Lauren Atieh of Rutgers University in New Jersey presented her chemistry game consisting of "Sleuth Problems." Students could choose to solve a problem by purchasing various pieces of information on a budget. Constants are free. If students get the problem correct they will gain money, if they submit an incorrect answer money is deducted from their budget. Using a Likert-scale tudents (N = 52) agree that the sleuth problems helped them self-diagnose their problem solving skills, encouraged them to work in groups, and helped them understand. The Likert-scale questions revealed that the sleuth problems did not help them prepare for the exam. Open-ended surveys also found that students were frustrated by the sleuth problems, namely where to begin. Finally, the open-ended survey uncovered that students felt the sleuth problems did not relate to the exam. Her future work will include a note in the IRB that students' solution maps will be collected as data.
CHED 2016 Nathaniel Beres and Aaron Roerdink from Heidelberg University in Ohio teach a course where students study the chemistry in art and then take an international trip to view the art. Stateside, students made paint & pigments, degraded the paint & pigments, analyzed the samples, discussed forgeries. They also studied the effects of acid, base and neutral solutions in contact with marble, brass, copper and clay (materials used to create sculptures). A key assignment prior to the trip is that students were delegated to serve as tour guides for the group at specific times in the overseas experience. While traveling, students completed a journal prompt for each day of the trip. Tours included a museum conservatory, a university with an art conservation program, and a world-renowned ceramics studio. Collaborating with the Psychology department gave these chemistry professors a "Universality-Diversity Scale" to assess if the program ended up enhancing students' world-view. A final assignment was for students to articulate when they observe an object that they would NOT consider "art" among the pieces they viewed during their trip. The cost per student was charged upfront as "fees" for the course $2500 / student. They refunded any unused portion of the money, in this case $700.
I read an article just before attending the conference about the hashtag #scicomm. A response article, which I have not fully read, was posted on a different media outlet about 24 hours later. I definitely do use social media to promote science. What are your thoughts?
CHED 1969 Ranier Glaser from University of Missouri discussed his recent publication wherein he taught spectral deconvolution using Excel in a course about how to do science. A take-home point of his talk was that "If the essence of science is peer review, then we're not teaching science if we're not doing peer review." And also "The idea that scientists are objective is a myth. They're ego driven, especially the successful ones. Peer review constrains the egos. Arguments are necessary. Peer review is a way of communication." You can find more about this course here: Undergraduate Seminar in Chemistry (3).New Curriculum on Scientific Writing, Peer Review, Science Communication. Writing-Intensive. Methods for reading, locating and presenting chemical information; data management, presentation and analysis; scientific writing; scientific peer review; professional ethics.
CHED 2015 Emily Lauren Atieh of Rutgers University in New Jersey presented her chemistry game consisting of "Sleuth Problems." Students could choose to solve a problem by purchasing various pieces of information on a budget. Constants are free. If students get the problem correct they will gain money, if they submit an incorrect answer money is deducted from their budget. Using a Likert-scale tudents (N = 52) agree that the sleuth problems helped them self-diagnose their problem solving skills, encouraged them to work in groups, and helped them understand. The Likert-scale questions revealed that the sleuth problems did not help them prepare for the exam. Open-ended surveys also found that students were frustrated by the sleuth problems, namely where to begin. Finally, the open-ended survey uncovered that students felt the sleuth problems did not relate to the exam. Her future work will include a note in the IRB that students' solution maps will be collected as data.
CHED 2016 Nathaniel Beres and Aaron Roerdink from Heidelberg University in Ohio teach a course where students study the chemistry in art and then take an international trip to view the art. Stateside, students made paint & pigments, degraded the paint & pigments, analyzed the samples, discussed forgeries. They also studied the effects of acid, base and neutral solutions in contact with marble, brass, copper and clay (materials used to create sculptures). A key assignment prior to the trip is that students were delegated to serve as tour guides for the group at specific times in the overseas experience. While traveling, students completed a journal prompt for each day of the trip. Tours included a museum conservatory, a university with an art conservation program, and a world-renowned ceramics studio. Collaborating with the Psychology department gave these chemistry professors a "Universality-Diversity Scale" to assess if the program ended up enhancing students' world-view. A final assignment was for students to articulate when they observe an object that they would NOT consider "art" among the pieces they viewed during their trip. The cost per student was charged upfront as "fees" for the course $2500 / student. They refunded any unused portion of the money, in this case $700.
I read an article just before attending the conference about the hashtag #scicomm. A response article, which I have not fully read, was posted on a different media outlet about 24 hours later. I definitely do use social media to promote science. What are your thoughts?
