A significant obstacle to engaging undergraduate students enrolled in chemistry courses is transcending the artificial boundaries separating lecture and laboratory activities and students' everyday experiences. This project, known as CLICK (Color and Light to Improve Chemical Knowledge), will provide students with multiple opportunities to explore connections between everyday life experiences and subject matter learned formally in chemistry courses throughout the undergraduate curriculum. Students will advance their experiential learning by engaging in various integrated sequential activities that progress through levels of complexity, from (1) using smartphone cameras and hand-held UV lamps to explore fluorescent and phosphorescent properties of common household materials; to (2) employing portable multifunctional chemical analysis systems to design their own experiments for investigating their daily surroundings; to (3) performing more refined and sophisticated laboratory-based experimentation with materials students bring in from outside the laboratory.
Outreach and dissemination activities will include: sharing CLICK activities with colleagues during faculty development workshops; involving the SUNY Oneonta Noyce scholars in informal science education activities at the campus Science Discovery Center; presenting at regional and national meetings; and publishing in appropriate journals. A variety of assessment and evaluation methods will be employed to measure the impact of the strategies and pedagogy developed by the project. These include the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ), the Chemistry Expectations Survey (CHEMX), the Views of the Nature of Science (VNOS) questionnaire, and American Chemical Society standardized exams, in addition to locally developed techniques to determine student engagement and learning.
