Collaborators at Hood College, Frederick Community College, and Mount St. Mary's College seek to develop inquiry based laboratory experiments while simultaneously providing a replicable model for increasing instrumentation access across multiple institutions. The implementation of these inquiry-based activities will place the responsibility for learning on the students, so that they engage with the material at a deeper level than in traditional ?confirmation? experiments. This will lead to greater internalization and integration of the material, which increases both student learning and confidence. The primary focus of this Improving Undergraduate Education project will be on integrating guided-inquiry experiences across the chemistry curriculum, however faculty in other disciplines including physics, geosciences, and art/archaeology will also be involved. Each activity will be developed by one institution, but as many as possible will be tested at multiple sites. Assessment will allow the activities to be vetted across different institution types (PUI versus community college) with varied student profiles, resulting in a library of experiments that can be shared with the chemical education community. The results of this work will be disseminated widely through posters, presentations, publications, and web-based resources.
There are varying levels of inquiry from low, level hands-on activities where the teacher determines the topics and questions to high level inquiry where the students determine all aspects of the experiment. Recognizing this, the collaborators plan to design experiments that use the highest level of inquiry possible, in which students choose the topic, methods, and finally share their interpretation of the results. In other words, students will be exposed to ways of learning and knowing that occur in scientific research. Data generated through assessment and evaluation should support the rationale that by cultivating students' self-efficacy in the laboratory environment, they will have better content knowledge and greater assurance in their scientific abilities. Formative and summative evaluation will focus on whether or not the project objectives have been met and the effectiveness of project activities. Each experiment will be evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively (pre- and post-tests and selected exam questions. Because of the small class sizes at all three participating institutions, quantitative data is expected to be helpful for some of the larger courses like general and organic chemistry, but will be of limited utility for small courses. Therefore immediate student feedback mechanisms for each experiment will be developed. The results of this work will be widely disseminated, both on the individual activity and project level. Innovative experiments will be published in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Chemical Education and The Chemical Educator. The results will also be presented at the American Chemical Society Biennial Conference on Chemical Education (2016). When appropriate, activities will also be uploaded to sub-discipline specific online communities such as the NSF-supported Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Resource. Project deliverables will include results of summative evaluation and all course materials.
