Even though there have been numerous innovations in chemistry education over the previous 50 years, most students still have difficulty learning chemistry concepts and exhibit difficulty while solving chemistry problems typically encountered in a general chemistry course for science and engineering majors. This presentation will describe efforts over the previous five years to implement an approach to learning chemistry that integrates guided-inquiry, the Science Writing Heuristic, Green Chemistry, interactive lecture demonstrations, computer simulations and animations in POGIL-like activities for learning electrolytes, thermochemistry, and buffers. Students using this approach do well enough on departmental exams and on ACS exams. The vast majority of students are enthusiastic about this approach. However, one instructor implementing effective innovations in one course does not have a big impact on students. Only when instructors in different disciplines agree to implement similar approaches in the course taken by a cohort of students, will the innovative approaches have a meaningful impact on students.

Exasperating encounters in chemistry education scholarship while developing and implementing educational innovations for students enrolled in general chemistry

255th National Meeting (2018)

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