This project is designed to increase a student's awareness of the utility of coupling together the techniques of chemical separation and characterization. The PIs are developing a tool to assess the educational impact of a series of programmed exposures to this set of chemical instrumentation.
In a typical laboratory curriculum, students are taught about chromatography and spectroscopy as independent techniques to separate or characterize samples. In this project student lab experiences are being expanded by exposure to state-of-the-practice instrumentation. Using a liquid chromatograph-mass spectrometer (LC/MS) enables them to obtain a coupled separation and characterization analysis. Both MS and LC techniques are being introduced in lower level courses using experiments adapted from the chemical education literature. In higher level courses, students are exploring the advantages of coupling these two techniques in a single analysis, adapting standard practices from industrial and academic research laboratories. Each use of the LC/MS by the students will involve a progressively more complex analysis in an adaptation of the Gradualism model developed elsewhere. Before and after each use, students will take a short assessment survey keyed to the complexity of the experiment they are doing. The results of these surveys will be used to examine perception and understanding differences between those students with one or two experiences and those with multiple and more complex experiences.
Community College partners will also participate in the use of this equipment in their organic chemistry and instrumental analysis courses, building upon prior collaborations in the use of other major instrumentation.
