Upper level undergraduate chemistry students often tune out around absorption spectroscopy. This is not a surprise as virtually all science students are exposed to it early and often. Despite this exposure, we find that our junior and senior students, who have negotiated and excelled at difficult chemistry courses previously, greatly struggle with what they expect to be a ‘simple’ activity that we will describe. This struggle is not surprising to the education community. It is well known that students can complete labs and solve problems without learning, as is often the case where the activities themselves are so demanding that students have no cognitive resources remaining to learn from the activity. The mismatch between student confidence and competence hinders the instruction of more progressive spectroscopic techniques, such as Raman and fluorescence. We solve this with a series of scaffold activities where we work closely with students and provide guiding feedback. These active learning spectrometer activities are built around a monochrometer with the detector replaced by paper, free software, and student’s own cell phones. We find overwhelmingly positive results toward student understanding of spectroscopic components and data processing. When implemented in our advanced physical chemistry and instrumental laboratories, students ultimately report enhanced understanding in post lab reflection assessments.

Closing the gap between confidence and competence using scaffolding in an active learning optical spectroscopy activity

Macromolecular Chemistry: The Second Century

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ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Expo

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.