Organic chemistry is a course that is required for a wide range of students, most of whom are not intending to pursue the subject any further and may not appreciate its relevance to their goals. This EHR: IUSE project will focus on distilling the content in the traditional two-course sequence down to a set of core ideas, central to the understanding of organic chemistry. The new courses will also highlight relevant interconnections between organic chemistry and other disciplines. A variety of learning materials including a textbook, online tutorials, videos, and active-learning, in-class activities will be created with input from chemistry and biochemistry faculty who appreciate the necessity for improving teaching and learning in the first two years of the chemistry curriculum.
The objective of this work is to design a coherent sequence of instructional materials and activities that will provide students with the opportunity to learn organic chemistry more deeply. The new curriculum will use Lewis acid-base chemistry as the scaffold to introduce the fundamental skills necessary to be successful in the course (classification of reactions by mechanistic sequence, understanding structure-function relationships, investigating models of bonding, etc.). Moreover, organic chemistry faculty will be enabled to guide students as they apply concepts in the context of practices that are generally useful to all scientists such as modeling, argumentation, explanation, and problem solving. This approach should also more effectively engage students from other disciplines such as chemical engineering, psychology, and biology. Formative evaluation will rely on a design-based research approach wherein a continuous cycle of assessment and feedback into the curriculum will occur. Assessment tools will be developed to measure student learning gains in a series of performance expectations related to the scientific practices mentioned above. These tools will be pilot tested and refined during the course of the project. Moreover, assessment will also be done for a cohort of students in the traditional courses, matched to the test group based on prior achievement, gender, ACT/SAT, MCA-i, and other relevant data. The results of assessments from both groups will then be compared. The preliminary results of the work will be disseminated through presentations and workshops at chemical education meetings such as the American Chemical Society Biennial Conference on Chemical Education.
