Seven years ago, the chemistry department at Furman University introduced a new, sophomore-level, introductory biological organic chemistry course to better prepare students entering health-related fields for the revised content of the new (2015) MCAT exam design.  At the time there existed no canonical textbook that covered the requisite material at an introductory level.  Based on a preponderance of education research documenting the improved learning outcomes derived from collaborative student learning activities and the success of crowd-sourced knowledge transmission in online wikis such as Wikipedia, we chose to give students the training and tools necessary to create for themselves an online wiki textbook to accompany the course.  Over the past seven years nearly five hundred Furman students have participated in this project as content creators, peer reviewers, editors, and content consumers.  The result is an entirely student-created, online textbook that many students report, via surveys and in-depth interviews, is as useful to them in this course as similar textbooks created by professional authors have been in their other courses.<br/> <br/>Previous research suggests social interaction plays an important role in online collaborative learning environments and creative language is valuable to developing social relationships, while our interviews suggest student-centered language plays an important role in student learning. In this research, we analyzed the unique and creative forms of language students used to describe complex scientific content and how the language evolved over subsequent student edits. We found numerous examples of creative language use, such as metaphors, rhetorical expressions, parallel structure, and repetition. In particular, we found a number of examples of personification, metaphors in which non-human nouns are attributed human-like qualities. Our findings lay the foundation for understanding student language use and their grasp of complex scientific content in ways that can inform the design of online learning technologies for chemical education.<br/>

Student-centered language and metaphor in a student-created online chemistry textbook

251st National Meeting (2016)

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