Mary Blackwell still finds it hard to believe sometimes that she ended up in chemistry.
"I was so bored with the classes at first," says Blackwell, associate professor of chemistry at Lawrence. "The way chemistry traditionally has been taught, it's so far removed from anything that's interesting," she said. "I ended up majoring in philosophy because you could talk about life's great issues right away."
"A [colleague] and I always joke that we were the canaries in the coal mine. For a lot of chemistry students, we've been killing them off because we were doing it wrong."
A group of chemists from Lawrence and about a dozen other schools are trying to change that. Armed with a $2.7 million National Science Foundation grant, they've begun a project to revolutionize the way undergraduate chemistry courses are taught. The ChemLinks Coalition, which is based at Beloit College, will spend the next five years devising a way to make chemistry classes more interactive, more collaborative, and even, well, more interesting.
The idea, according to Jerrold P. Lokensgard, the Robert McMillan Professor of Chemistry and chairman of the LU chemistry department, is to teach chemistry through real-life examples instead of through abstract models and equations. "Chemistry classes tend to be a lot of textbook-oriented lecture with maybe a demonstration," Lokensgard said. "It's a lot of talk and chalk, which is not necessarily effective over a fifty to seventy minute time span. The problem is that classes haven't been tied directly to how this stuff relates to life. But almost anything that somebody does in the course of a day could conceivably be related to chemistry."
Under the new method, the basics--like atomic structure and stoichiometry (the number of atoms involved in an equation)--no longer would be taught chapter by chapter. Instead, professors would let chemistry unfold through a series of carefully prepared questions such as, "Is there a problem with having a nuclear power plant on the shore of Lake Michigan?" and "Are alcohol-based fuels economical?" Professors at schools throughout the ChemLinks Coalition are just starting to develop those questions, which would take up to a month to answer.
Cliffe D. Joel, professor of chemistry, spent the summer writing a curriculum on brain chemistry. "I've thought out a general outline," he said. "The first thing is something I've done in class quite regularly, and that's have students write down any case of major emotional problems or mental illness in their immediate family or five best friends. Usually 90 percent to 95 percent write down something. But after that, I'd talk about how we can look inside your brain painlessly. Brain scanning methods like the CAT scan and MRI depend on electrons inside an atom being active. So right away I'd be starting with the most basic thing in chemistry, called an atom."
To Joel, the change is so important that he's willing to re-think ideas formed after twenty-six years of teaching college chemistry. "I think it's going to help both science majors and non-majors," he said. "Chemistry should not be just facts. It is a much more interesting and a much more intellectually challenging process."
Lokensgard said that efforts will be made to make sure students of "new chemistry" learn the basics well enough to pass their exams for graduate school or medical school. "There has to be a residue of factual material that's there at the end of the course," he said. "But we hope that, in this case, there's also a more conceptual sense of what theyıve learned."
Brock Spencer of Beloit, consortium director, said the eventual goal is to compile the best questions into textbooks that can be used at universities nationwide. "We're going to try things out on ourselves and our students first and see how it goes," he said.
Several other national groups, including one based at the University of Wisconsin, have received National Science Foundation grants to pursue similar chemistry teaching concepts, he said.
Other schools in the ChemLinks Coalition include Carleton, Macalester, and St. Olaf Colleges in Minnesota; Grinnell College in Iowa; the University of Chicago; and Washington University in St. Louis.
Editor's note:Susan Vanney is a staff writer for
the Post-Crescent, Appleton, Wisconsin, from which this article is reprinted, with
permission.
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