Process Workshops for General Chemistry

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The Motivation for Process Workshops

Changes in society, technology, and the world economy are occurring at increasingly faster rates. College graduates need to be quick learners, critical thinkers, and problem solvers to survive. They need to be computer literate and skillful in communicating, teamwork, management, and assessment. Traditional teaching methods at post-secondary institutions no longer are meeting students' educational needs because many courses maintain the conventional objectives of structuring and presenting information. Students are expected to develop skills in learning, thinking, and problem solving on their own and are not succeeding. Demands from industry for graduates who have an interdisciplinary perspective and are skilled in teamwork, communication, management, and assessment go unheeded. Challenges posed by the students' increasing diversity in academic preparation, cultural backgrounds, motivation, and career goals go unmet.

Under such conditions, many students have difficulty understanding and applying concepts, finding relevance, identifying and developing the skills they need for success in college and a career, and transferring skills within and across disciplines. Students miss the experience of science as the exchange and evolution of ideas, and gender and ethnic issues are ignored. Poor performers withdraw from learning, and even the best performers may disengage because they are not challenged. The results are low levels of learning and high levels of attrition. Both students and faculty are frustrated by the lack of achievement and community. These issues (1-12) are compounded at institutions like Stony Brook that have large numbers of diverse students in introductory courses.

Process Workshops - A New Model for Instruction

To address these problems, a new model for instruction is being developed at Stony Brook. Recitation sessions associated with the lecture courses in introductory General Chemistry are being replaced by process workshops. This novel format, which could be used in all class meetings, is student-centered and emphasizes both subject mastery and skill development in key process areas. Features of these workshops have been adapted for use in Biology, Economics, Mathematics, Physics, and other Chemistry courses at Stony Brook.

In a process workshop, students work in teams to acquire information and develop understanding through guided discovery. They examine models or examples, which provide all the information central to the lesson, and respond to critical-thinking questions, which we call "key questions." Learning and retention is facilitated in this format because students are actively involved in learning rather than passively listening to lectures or reading textbooks. The key questions compel the students to process the information, to verbalize and share their understanding with each other, and to make inferences and conclusions, i.e. construct knowledge. They then apply this knowledge in simple exercises and to problems that require higher order thinking involving analysis, synthesis, transference, expert methodologies, and integration with previously learned concepts. The teams present their results to the class, assess how well they have done and how they could do better, and reflect on what they have learned. Students leave the workshop with a computer-generated personalized homework assignment, which is produced with the CAPA system (13,14), that they must complete during the following week.

The workshop activities are carefully designed to incorporate recent ideas on active learning (15,16), the importance of interdisciplinary applications and real world contexts (17-19), the development of critical thinking (4,20-25) and problem solving skills (20,26-28), and moving students from Piaget's concrete operational stage of development to the formal operational stage. (29-32)

The learning teams are facilitated by faculty or graduate student instructors and undergraduate teaching assistants, who have been trained to aid students in defining goals, thinking critically, and solving problems. In this environment, students assist each other in developing understanding and applying concepts, finding relevance, reflecting on their strengths and areas for improvement, and developing strategies for improving their skills in the key processes of learning, thinking, problem solving, communication, teamwork, management, and assessment. The workshops have produced remarkable improvements in student efforts, attitudes, and accomplishments. They have energized both students and faculty, created an atmosphere of excitement, and fostered a community of learners.

Others have experienced similar success in chemistry programs utilizing cooperative learning groups (33-35) and personalized assignments (13,14). Also, a detailed assessment of a successful three-year project teaching problem solving in physics through cooperative grouping at the University of Minnesota has been published. (36,37)

Our process model has some unique features relative to these and other efforts. It is being developed in a large (1000 students) main-stream General Chemistry course at a major research university. It involves coordinating the efforts of undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants and other faculty members. The structure of formal cooperative-learning groups, developed by David and Roger Johnson at the University of Minnesota's Center for Cooperative Learning, is being adapted and used (6), and the workshops incorporate the development of process skills with cooperative learning. Each workshop lesson provides students with many opportunities to acquire information, construct understanding, and develop skills. The structure of each workshop imposes considerable responsibility on individual team members for their success, which is essential for skill development.

Deliverables Resulting from Current Funding

• An activity book, Foundations of Chemistry, providing 60 workshop activities on the principal topics included in two semesters of General Chemistry. This book has been published by Pacific Crest and is licensed to Houghton Mifflin, who will publish it as an ancillary, Discovering Chemistry - An Activity Book for Collaborative Learning, with their textbook Chemistry (Fourth Edition, January, 1997) by Steven S. Zumdahl.
• A manual, An Instructor's Guide to Process Workshops, describing concepts and methods for new instructors.
• A manual, Training Manual for Process Workshop Instructors, providing sample training activities for implementers.
• Over 100 copies of Foundations of Chemistry and the Instructor's Guide have been distributed to interested faculty.
• Seminars and workshops at Stony Brook and at other institutions.
• Chemistry Seminar, SUNY at Stony Brook, 1994.
• Chemistry Seminar, City College, CUNY, 1995.
• Chemical Education Seminar, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1996.
• Physical Sciences Seminar, SUNY Farmingdale, 1996.
• Talks, posters, and workshops at regional and national meetings.
• Gordon Research Conference on Innovations in College Chemistry Teaching, Ventura, CA, 1995.
• Pacific Crest Teaching and Authoring Institute, Geneva, NY, 1995.
• Inaugural Conference of the Long Island Consortium for Interconnected Learning, Stony Brook, 1996. Biennial Conference on Chemical Education, Clemson, S.C., 1996.
• Gordon Research Conference on Innovations in College Chemistry Teaching, Plymouth, N.H., 1996.
• Long Island Consortium for Interconnected Learning Conference on Collaborative Learning, Stony Brook, 1996.
• The 1997 Stony Brook General Chemistry Teaching Workshop, to be held July 20th - July 25th.
• A paper, Process - The Missing Element: Workshops for General Chemistry, submitted to J. Chem. Ed. for publication.
• Several computer-based activities from the LUCID program to test and demonstrate the enhancements offered by the use of computer technology.

The Character of SUNY Stony Brook and the Department of Chemistry

SUNY Stony Brook is one of the four university centers of the State University of New York. The undergraduate enrollment at Stony Brook is more than 11,000 students, and the graduate enrollment is about 6,000. Because of the ethnic diversity of the New York metropolitan area from which it draws most of its student body, Stony Brook is the most heterogeneous of the system's four university centers with more than 1/3 of the undergraduates classified as minorities. Many students are the first in their families to attend college. The Carnegie Foundation has classified Stony Brook as a Class One Research University. Iit is the only public institution in New York State to receive such designation and the youngest nationally.

The Chemistry Department is one of Stony Brook's premier departments with strong commitments to both teaching and research. The commitment of Department faculty to excellence in teaching has been recognized by others, including students. Six faculty have received the system-wide (64 campuses) SUNY President's and Chancellor's Awards for Excellence in Teaching, and nine, including the PI of this proposal, have been recognized formally by graduating classes as being outstanding teachers.

The Department supports internal organizations and activities that enhance its educational mission. A Master of Arts in Teaching program is provided for those wishing to enter teaching as a career, and a Chemical Education Resource Center serves K-12 students and teachers. The Director of the Center is a nationally recognized award-winning educator, Dr. C.V. Krishnan, who teaches both at the University and at a local high school. The Department supports the Undergraduate Chemistry Society and sponsors academic year and summer research programs for undergraduates. The author of this paper, as Chair of the Department, was the first at Stony Brook to develop a formal industrial internship program for undergraduates.

The Department of Chemistry and the author of this paper are full participants in three University-wide projects having a strong impact on undergraduate education. In 1993 Stony Brook initiated Project WISE (Women in Physical Science and Engineering), designed to encourage and prepare talented female undergraduates at Stony Brook for graduate study in science, engineering, and mathematics. Project WISE has received a major NSF grant to further its objectives. The University is the lead institution in the Long Island Consortium for Interconnected Learning (LICIL) which is a comprehensive interdisciplinary project, involving ten colleges and universities on Long Island, aimed at improving how faculty teach and how students learn in mathematically based subjects. This project is funded through the NSF initiative Mathematical Sciences and their Applications throughout the Curriculum (NSF CCD-MATH). Recently the SUNY Alliance for Minority Participation in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology was funded by NSF to double over five years the number of underrepresented minority students receiving bachelors degrees and greatly increase the number of such students pursuing graduate degrees in these fields.

The Department of Chemistry sustains a very significant teaching obligation, serving especially majors in Biological Sciences, pre-health professions, and Engineering. Each semester about 3500 students register for undergraduate Chemistry courses. Annually about 1,600 students enroll in the two course General Chemistry sequence. Each of these courses is offered in the Fall, Spring, and Summer Semesters. The Department offers a B.S. degree in Chemistry with five options in the areas of Chemical Science, Biological Chemistry, Chemical Physics, Environmental Chemistry, and Marine and Atmospheric Chemistry along with a program in Materials Chemistry, which is provided through collaboration with the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Honors courses at the freshman and sophomore levels are available, and a Departmental Honors degree can be achieved through participation in research.

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