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Undergraduate Chemistry Education: A Workshop Summary (2014)

Chapter: 5 Final Thoughts and Discussion

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Suggested Citation:"5 Final Thoughts and Discussion." National Research Council. 2014. Undergraduate Chemistry Education: A Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18555.
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5

Final Thoughts and Discussion

“We need to come out of the paradigm that we are providers of information. Information is on the web, it is in books, it is everywhere. It does not make sense to have all of that information in our brains … we need the strategic knowledge to be able to use the information that is available everywhere.”

Miguel Garcia-Garibay

“It seems an incredible travesty to have students walking in the door who devoutly believe that they want to be science majors, a lot of them chemistry majors, who walk out the door with a non-STEM degree. This is a huge loss for the nation.”

Susan Olesik

In the workshop’s final session, William Carroll, a vice president at Occidental Chemical Corporation and cochair of the Chemical Sciences Roundtable, moderated a panel discussion among chemistry department chairs to get their insights into the state of undergraduate chemistry education and their views on the types of innovations that had been presented in the previous sessions. Members of the panel included Michael Doyle from the University of Maryland; Miguel Garcia-Garibay from the University of California, Los Angeles; Sarah Green from Michigan Technological University; Susan Olesik from The Ohio State University; Jeffrey Reimer of the University of California, Berkeley; and William Tolman from the University of Minnesota. Carroll started the panel discussion by asking each member to take 5 minutes to react to the things they had heard and put them into the context of their own experiences.

Tolman was impressed by the number of creative approaches from dynamic, enthusiastic, and talented faculty who are striving to improve chemistry education. He noted that these cutting-edge approaches do not always produce easily discernible improvements in student learning, but added that the “enthusiasm and talent applied has to be an improvement.” He was also struck by Susan Hixson’s comments about the missed opportunities to promulgate these novel approaches beyond their home departments and institutions and agreed with her suggestion that chemistry education papers should be embedded in research journals and at scientific conferences. Spreading the word will be key, he said.

Reimer called the workshop presentations “thrilling and uplifting” and stated that he was looking forward to talking to his faculty colleagues about these novel approaches to chemistry education. He was surprised and pleased to hear the industry panelists were of the opinion that chemistry education needs to be fine-tuned to include multiple intelligences but not completely redone. Reimer emphasized that the chemistry community needs to turn “private empiricism”—individuals pursuing new course design based on intuition and experience—into a legitimate scholarly enterprise based on evidence developing in the chemistry education community.

The importance of student-driven activities stood out as a key point that Olesik took from the presentations. “We have to keep reminding ourselves that we need to be the facilitators and not the doers of this work,” she said. Angelica Stacy’s presentation was important because it drove home the point of how important the design of appropriate exam material is in terms of influencing how students learn and retain information. Finally, Olesik was impressed with the “incredible power that is starting to assemble and the changes that people want to make in teaching chemistry. The world of the biological sciences, and even of physicists, has been moving faster on these fronts and it is really great that the chemists are assigning themselves to this task at a higher level now.”

Change of this magnitude is taking years, said Green, and somehow the community must make change happen more quickly. She was struck by the emphasis on multidisciplinary teams and hands-on problem solving based on real-world issues that engages student creativity and worried that the conservative elements of the teaching enterprise will stifle these kinds of courses. Agreeing with Olesik, she said that assessment and evaluation can be important drivers of change.

Garcia-Garibay also agreed with Olesik’s point that students’ involvement is key and that students can be important agents who add value to knowledge. He noted that chemistry education had done a reasonable job training future chemistry professionals; however, chemistry education is not doing a good job of encouraging students to continue in the broader scientific field and in conveying the importance

Suggested Citation:"5 Final Thoughts and Discussion." National Research Council. 2014. Undergraduate Chemistry Education: A Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18555.
×

of chemistry and its fundamental principles to students in the humanities and social sciences. Garcia-Garibay agreed with several presenters that better assessment is needed for how new approaches to chemistry education affect student performance and on the impact of these innovations across the university. He reiterated the early comment that the community needs to work hard at introducing these innovative approaches to much larger audiences and particularly to younger colleagues and teaching assistants.

Speaking from the perspective of having been involved in higher education for 45 years, Doyle said he was impressed with the era of experimentation and innovation that the workshop’s speakers represent. He commented on what appears to be a move to use lower-cost methods of instruction that take education away from the master–apprentice approach that has dominated education for so long, and then posed a series of questions that going forward could serve as food for thought for the community.

•   What if the National Science Foundation (NSF) had spent money on multiple textbooks that had emphasized interdisciplinary activities in the 1980s and 1990s instead of investing in individual institutions and initiatives that were coming from those institutions?

•   What if the American Chemical Society (ACS) Committee on Professional Training had made interdisciplinary education as its mode of approach instead of the subdisciplinary approach that existed in the 1980s and 1990s?

•   What if research as an initiation of students to the potential of understanding problem solving and careers in the sciences had moved from a time period that was the capstone experience of a student to a freshman experience that allowed the freshmen to actually start looking at these things early in their educational experience?

Doyle also wondered if the community has the knowledge to understand which of the many approaches presented at the workshop work best and if the nation has the resources to implement any more than one of these approaches. He posed this last issue as a challenge that the community needs to face going forward.

THE CASE FOR CHANGE

Carroll next asked the panel if the case had been made that chemistry education needs to change. Olesik felt that the case for change in the broad field of science education has been made for some time, given the low retention rate for students who express an interest in pursuing a science career when they first enter college and who would be considered the top students based on entering standardized test scores. “It just seems to be an incredible travesty to me to have students walking in the door who devoutly believe that they want to be science majors, a lot of them chemistry majors, who walk out the door with something that is not a STEM major,” she stated. “This is a huge loss for the nation.” She added that the innovations she heard at the workshop are “spectacular. It is the institutional structures that are a problem.”

Students are driving the need for change, said Green, because they have such an evolving smorgasbord of opportunities in front of them. “If they do not like the way we are teaching in our institution, they go somewhere else,” she said. Without change, she added, “they are going to vote with their feet or with their dollars.” Doyle agreed with this sentiment and noted a program at the University of Maryland College of Engineering that was started 15 years ago when faculty realized that only 38 percent of entering students were graduating in 5 years. The college instituted a program that matches a cohort of 40 students with one faculty member for 2 years with the result that 68 percent of students now finish their degrees in 5 years. “Personal interaction remains a primary determinant on a student’s success,” he said.

When Carroll asked if anyone wanted to make the case that change was not needed, Tolman said that he did not want to make the opposite case, but refine it. He said that he had not heard the case that fundamental, large-scale institutional change was necessary, but that teaching methods do need to evolve, which should be a natural part of being an educator. Tolman agreed wholeheartedly with the assessment that the community needs to do a better job educating the nonprofessional about science, but that in his mind the evidence was mixed as to whether there is a lack of trained science professionals that is resulting from the low retention rate.

Garcia-Garibay noted that the panel had not addressed the problem of the cost of education, and that is a major driver of change. The cost of education at a large institution such as his is unsustainable, he said, and the major cost of education is faculty. “We need to rethink the paradigm,” he said. “How to engage this very expensive faculty in what is becoming an increasingly important portion of the university enterprise?” Carroll asked if chemistry was ripe for the kind of disruptive innovation that could change the cost structure of education, and Tolman replied that massive open online courses (MOOCs) could be such a disruptive force.

Given that the panelists are all department chairs, Carroll noted, he asked them how they plan to drive change in their departments. Tolman said that his department is trying many of these innovations. “We have online sections. We have a MOOC in our department. We have active learning classes, and in fact we have a whole building filled with active learning classrooms that we use with these methodologies. I’m not saying we should not be doing these things. I’m questioning the need for large-scale institutional change throughout the entire system.”

Suggested Citation:"5 Final Thoughts and Discussion." National Research Council. 2014. Undergraduate Chemistry Education: A Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18555.
×

Reimer said that one key is practicing what you preach. “When I talk to my colleagues and tell them that I want to have an active learning classroom, I have to do it myself and show it to be successful. That makes my voice far more effective.” Part of showing his efforts to be successful, he said, is making sure to demonstrate quantitatively with good assessment tools that the innovative methods are making a difference. “Credibility is an important tool for driving change,” he said. Green added that change requires champions willing to take on the task and be rewarded for their efforts, and that requires changing a university’s culture in terms of how it values education versus research.

When Carroll then asked for examples of how the panelists introduced change in their departments, Tolman said that he used a video about accidents at two leading universities to introduce a major initiative on safety culture. Reimer said that he held a meeting at which faculty were allowed to have a democratic dialog about a new curriculum that he guided to a predetermined conclusion. Doyle noted that the decision to make a change in the curriculum is out of his hands because so many students from other departments have a chemistry requirement. “Unless we partner with these other departments, our goal of moving toward interdisciplinary curricula is going to be very difficult,” he said.

FLEXIBILITY AND SUBJECT MASTERY

From the industry panel’s discussions, Carroll had the impression that industry is still interested in subject mastery and depth, but at the same time is looking for students to have technological flexibility. He also noted that a number of the innovative approaches that were presented at the workshop are using context in combination with traditional educational methods. The question he had for the panel was, “Can we take real-world problems and use those to teach the skills that provide flexibility and motivate students while at the same time get to the same depth and mastery that industry seems to be asking for in our students?”

Garcia-Garibay thought that this was possible, though not in every single instance, but what was important was to teach students about the processes of acquiring information, analyzing information, and then transforming that information into action. “We need to come out of the paradigm that we are providers of information,” he explained. “The information is in the Web. It is in the books. It is everywhere. It does not make any sense to have all of that information in our brains. We do not need the depth in terms of that information, but we need the strategic knowledge to be able to use information that is available everywhere.”

Olesik said that the work that James Anderson and Scott Auerbach described suggests that it is possible to prepare students to be technologically flexible and have a good grounding in the fundamentals of science. Doyle noted that one problem he sees is that this approach might produce students who know how to learn and assimilate science knowledge but that they will not have learned enough content to do well on standardized tests such as the MCAT or Graduate Record Exam.

Carroll responded by asking, “How do we know that we are actually educating better scientists by doing it in a new way?” Tolman added that the key is assessment, but the problem is that most of research faculty, like him, who also teach are not education experts. “We do not know a lot about assessment. We are told to do it, but we do not really learn about it,” Tolman said. Carroll acknowledged that short-term assessment was something that the community was going to need to get better at, but the point he wanted to address was whether 5 years down the road students who have passed through these new programs will be better scientists in the workplace. Olesik replied that this was an easy assessment—the companies and institutions that hire these students will either be happy with our product or not. Based on her experience with students who have had an interdisciplinary, deep science class or an active learning class, she thinks that answer will be yes, these students are as good as or better than those who take traditional classes. The panelists also noted that these innovative methods are also giving students better training in nonscience skills such as writing and presentation.

In a final question for the panel, Carroll asked the department chairs if they thought these innovations could be scaled and implemented outside of the home institution. In Tolman’s view, the answer is absolutely yes. What it will take, though, is educating faculty so that they want to do it. Reimer agreed and said that funding organizations such as the NSF and Dreyfus Foundation need to continue incentivizing the adoption of these methods, even at a small level. Green also agreed and noted that at her institution, peer-to-peer tutoring has spread so that all classes at Michigan Tech use it to some degree.

TAKING ACTION

As a final activity to close out the discussion, Carroll asked each panelist to state their opinion on what the chemistry community needs to do to accelerate the adoption of the types of innovations presented at the workshop. Doyle said that the sheer number of students that pass through chemistry courses is so large that it has an overwhelming impact on how departments think about their curricula. Instead, he said the focus should be on identifying the students who really need to know chemistry and focus on educating them. Garcia-Garibay returned to the idea that the community needs to figure out how to offer what is a very desirable product in a more economically viable manner. Doing so will require maximizing the value of the most expensive component of college education, the faculty member, and the monologue lecture is not the way

Suggested Citation:"5 Final Thoughts and Discussion." National Research Council. 2014. Undergraduate Chemistry Education: A Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18555.
×

to do that. The community needs to figure out how to use technology to address that problem.

Green followed that comment by saying that the reward system has to change to support faculty with innovative ideas. Universities need to encourage faculty to experiment, to take risks, and to fail, just as they do in their research laboratories. Olesik added to that by suggesting that universities need to support interdisciplinary educational programs and develop the financial structures to do so.

With three suggestions on his list of to-do items, Reimer said that the first thing that must happen is for everyone attending the workshop to become leaders at their respective institutions. Second, he would like to see someone develop the MOOC equivalent of the laboratory experience, an activity that he characterized as an interesting intellectual challenge. Finally, he said that someone needs to study, confront, and solve the problem of adolescents in the classroom. “All of my students are smart, but many do not succeed and to a large extent because they are adolescents,” Reimer stated.

Tolman also thought the laboratory experience should become an area of focus, but he was of the opinion that the laboratory experience was the one place where in-person, hands-on instruction would not be replaced by a MOOC. “We should be looking at doing things in our labs that inculcate teamwork, cooperation, safety, and culture, all of those things the industrial people want,” he said.

Carroll then turned to the workshop attendees and asked each of them to give a one-sentence idea for action based on the workshop’s presentations. Their responses were as follows:

•   It is important to remember that NSF has funded 20 years of great work upon which this community should draw.

•   Make use of the existing body of research on evaluation and instructional methods instead of reinventing the wheel.

•   Have the courage to stop innovative programs that are not working.

•   Apply the scientific method to teaching—make hypotheses, test them, determine outcomes, and revise those hypotheses in response to data.

•   Ensure that each new innovative approach is assessed thoroughly and individually.

•   Put additional resources into authentic assessment of innovative methods of teaching, for without authentic assessment there will never be broad change.

•   Focus on retention and scientific literacy as key outcome measures.

•   Continue to be creative and continue experimenting.

•   These innovative methods have given us the opportunity to enhance the education of the best students who are always going to succeed, but also get the attention of the average student who represents the majority of the population.

•   There is still a need to develop a new interdisciplinary general education course that meets the science requirement and satisfies university administrators.

•   Increase the emphasis on student-centered approaches, which have been shown to increase retention and student preparation.

•   Teaching students to be able to read a newspaper article in a scientifically critical manner is the most important skill for them to master.

•   Continue developing new approaches that give students skills in collaboration, speaking, and writing.

•   Ensure that students who complete these courses have a clear understanding of the process of science, not just the facts of science.

•   Keep in mind that the primary job of education should be to transform students from containers of information to creators of knowledge.

•   Remember that there is a broad spectrum of different learning goals, some of which can be served by things like MOOCs, but not all.

•   Do not minimize the importance of personal interactions between faculty and students.

•   The idea of engaging the students in real-world problems is extremely exciting, but the problem is how to scale that up beyond a small number of students.

•   Increase the focus on broad-based adoption of even the simple steps that can be taken to improve learning.

•   Identify common outcomes so that the community can accelerate the spread of these innovative ideas.

•   Support departments implementing new educational paradigms by hiring their students.

•   Develop a system that incentivizes teaching that is similar to the way that the current system incentivizes research.

•   Make better use of the cohort of current faculty that are serving in adjunct positions.

•   Expose tenured faculty at large research institutions to the problems of science education.

•   Tap into the larger scientific community outside of the ACS for help in developing principles, strategies, and leadership.

•   Include community colleges in this discussion.

•   Be sensitive to and aware of the major demographic shifts that have occurred over the past 20 years and that are continuing to change.

GENERAL OBSERVATIONS

In her closing remarks, organizing committee cochair Patricia Thiel summarized some of the key messages that

Suggested Citation:"5 Final Thoughts and Discussion." National Research Council. 2014. Undergraduate Chemistry Education: A Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18555.
×

she is taking home from the workshop. Very broadly, she said, it is a great time to be thinking about and talking about education renovation because of two things—great technology and a great foundation of scientific information about what works and what does not work in science education and in chemistry education upon which to carry out renovation. She applauded the efforts to focus educational efforts on global problems and the desire to produce more scientifically literate students. She noted the emphasis on engendering teamwork among students and ownership by students, as well as the importance of designing exams that match the desired outcome goals. She also acknowledged how much work and support are needed for innovations to take hold in institutions. Toward that end, Thiel reiterated the need for innovators to generate evidence that their courses work, that they improve outcomes or maintain outcomes with fewer resources, and that they meet their objectives. “Assessment is important because it will help to convince other people that change is worthy,” she said. She also said that it is clear that the community needs to do a better job disseminating these new methods.

She then challenged everyone to think back to the filters they brought to the workshop, to the preconceived biases, and throw them away. “Try to digest the information that was presented in the workshop perhaps through somebody else’s point of view,” she said. “If you are an educator like me, try to digest them through the point of view of someone who might be funding these programs at NSF or digest them through the point of view of someone who has devoted their lifetime to studying science education and doing assessment.”

Suggested Citation:"5 Final Thoughts and Discussion." National Research Council. 2014. Undergraduate Chemistry Education: A Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18555.
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Suggested Citation:"5 Final Thoughts and Discussion." National Research Council. 2014. Undergraduate Chemistry Education: A Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18555.
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Suggested Citation:"5 Final Thoughts and Discussion." National Research Council. 2014. Undergraduate Chemistry Education: A Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18555.
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Suggested Citation:"5 Final Thoughts and Discussion." National Research Council. 2014. Undergraduate Chemistry Education: A Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18555.
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Suggested Citation:"5 Final Thoughts and Discussion." National Research Council. 2014. Undergraduate Chemistry Education: A Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18555.
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Suggested Citation:"5 Final Thoughts and Discussion." National Research Council. 2014. Undergraduate Chemistry Education: A Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18555.
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Suggested Citation:"5 Final Thoughts and Discussion." National Research Council. 2014. Undergraduate Chemistry Education: A Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18555.
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Undergraduate Chemistry Education is the summary of a workshop convened in May 2013 by the Chemical Science Roundtable of the National Research Council to explore the current state of undergraduate chemistry education. Research and innovation in undergraduate chemistry education has been done for many years, and one goal of this workshop was to assist in the transfer of lessons learned from the education research community to faculty members whose expertise lies in the field of chemistry rather than in education. Through formal presentations and panel discussions, participants from academia, industry, and funding organizations explored drivers of change in science, technology, engineering and mathematics education; innovations in chemistry education; and challenges and opportunities in chemistry education reform. Undergraduate Chemistry Education discusses large-scale innovations that are transferable, widely applicable, and/or proven successful, with specific consideration of drivers and metrics of change, barriers to implementation of changes, and examples of innovation in the classroom.

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