POGIL and other guided inquiry methods are increasingly being used in chemistry classes, with a strong emphasis on developing high-school and early undergraduate curricula and measuring their success. Here I describe a POGIL implementation of a graduate level Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics course. Quantitative measures such as student surveys show that reworking a graduate course in a POGIL format has strong positive effects on overall satisfaction, ability to stimulate thinking, course organization, and teacher effectiveness. Exam scores also improved (1 of 3 exams) or stayed the same (2 of 3 exams) (n=10 students). Subjectively, the course was well received by both the strong and weak students; more students engaged with the material at a deep conceptual level; and the POGIL methodology made it possible to introduce successfully some advanced, abstract concepts which failed in a lecture format (e.g. homogeneous functions and system scaling properties). Finally, prospects for constructing POGIL worksheets with models of dynamic phenomena (brownian motion, heat flow, the fluctuation-dissipation theorem) based on simulations which run on mobile devices will be discussed.

POGIL implementation of graduate level statistical mechanics and thermodynamics

247th National Meeting (2014)

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