This collaborative project between Bowling Green State University (a doctoral granting research university), Dakota County Technical College (an Associates degree granting 2-year school), and The Concord Consortium (a nonprofit educational research and development organization) is developing and examining a technology-based pedagogy that is challenging students to create their own molecular simulations covering a wide variety of basic concepts in general chemistry, physical chemistry, biochemistry, and nanotechnology. The curriculum materials, called "Constructive Chemistry" are based on The Concord Consortium's Molecular Workbench which provides the graphical user interfaces for authoring visually compelling and scientifically accurate, interactive simulations. Each instructional unit is posing one or more problems that can be solved using molecular simulations and their analytic tools. For example, students are investigating why average kinetic energy, rather than average speed, of molecules provides a microscopic interpretation of temperature. They are discovering deviations from the Ideal Gas Law as a function of the properties of the constituent gas molecules. They are designing a molecular sieve, a fuel cell, or a nanofabrication procedure. The students are achieving these accomplishments through a scaffolded process that is enabling them to both learn science content and modeling skills, while also building their understanding of the basic chemistry concepts.
This project is allowing science to be taught as a verb, rather than a noun since 'doing science' is a compelling and effective way to learn. Enabling the process of exploration, creation, and invention, the students are applying theories, testing ideas, and synthesizing knowledge. By constructing molecular simulations, students are learning abstract concepts and reshaping their intuition.
The project is utilizing computational chemistry to support student design and problem solving and is transforming how state-of-the-art computational tools are used to support student learning at all levels. The approach being developed is readily implemented by any course worldwide and is taking advantage of the widely used, freely available, Molecular Workbench resource.
Molecular reasoning, the ability to think about scientific phenomena at the molecular level, is a fundamentally important skill that we must teach in chemistry. Molecular reasoning is often based on a dynamic chain of concepts, which can be quite complex at times. It is often very challenging for students to imagine how molecules interact over time and how different concepts emerge from these interactions. An example is the relationship among macroscopic concepts such as temperature, pressure, mole number, and volume of a gas. All these concepts are connected by the Kinetic Molecular Theory and can be explained using the theory. But how these concepts and their connections emerge from perpetual molecular motion and interaction requires multiple steps of reasoning (e.g., the increase of temperature --> the increase of kinetic energy of molecules --> the increase of speeds of molecules --> the increase of collision frequency and impact force with a wall --> the increase of pressure on the wall --> the increase of volume if the wall can be expanded). This is a fairly lengthy and complicated reasoning process. The Constructive Chemistry project investigated how a constructionist approach, which challenges students to construct a computer simulation of a molecular process, can foster molecular reasoning. Constructive Chemistry gives students the liberty to design a chemical process step by step with their own ideas and at their own pace and observe the results of each step through dynamic visualization generated by the Molecular Workbench software that provides instantaneous visual feedback about how their ideas play out at each try. The project also developed a new assessment tool for measuring whether Constructive Chemistry faciliates the growth of molecular reasoning skill. This "Rube Goldberg" assessment tool aims to probe students' causality reasoning ability. Although considered as a special implementation of the more general concept map assessment tool, this assessment tool is specifically configured to map to complex molecular dynamics unique to chemistry. Compared with other types of assessment tools such as multiple-choice questions or open-response questions, this assessment tool has the following advantages: 1) It is much more open-ended than multiple-choice questions and can potentially produce more and deeper information about student understanding about complex concepts; 2) Unlike open-response questions, it is confined within a target conceptual space (this assessment tool provides students with a limited set of "nodes," each representing a relevant concept or a distractor, and requires students to "connect the dots" through the right nodes in the right order); 3) Unlike text analysis using techniques from natural language processing, data analysis with this assessment tool does not suffer from ambiguity and uncertainty; and 4) This assessment tool can be fully implemented in Web-based learning environments to provide formative or summative assessments and automatic feedback to students and teachers.
