Exposing undergraduate chemistry students to research and the research process has become an important and, perhaps, essential aspect to any undergraduate chemistry program. And although undergraduate research experiences are quite valuable, they are often an exposure to only a small slice of the research process and far removed from the undergraduate curriculum. Consequently, there has been a recent push to integrate research experiences into the undergraduate curriculum. Furthermore, in an effort to integrate teaching the research process into the undergraduate curriculum, our department has redesigned the first laboratory experience, session one of the General Chemistry laboratory, to lay the foundation for more research oriented, exploratory experiments that would follow throughout the entire curriculum. For some time, our upper division courses have integrated exploratory oriented labs designed to encourage student creativity and active learning, and hopefully building interest as the answers to some lab experiments are not predetermined. However, we saw an opportunity to model the research process by emphasizing the use of the scientific literature early in their first semester. Where the first laboratory day used to be just a check-in/safety day and then a remedial lesson on graphing with Microsoft Excel, teaching them the typical format and layout that we will routinely expect for graphing result during subsequent labs, for several years we have integrated concepts and skills related to the scientific literature by having students reproduce graphs found in the literature. Although many articles could be used, we chose to use a published paper co-authored by a TU undergraduate to build relevance, interest, and confidence among the class and because we have access to the raw data. The lesson now has five points of emphasis, each of which situates the students within the scientific process: (1) to illustrate how the content within the curriculum is a natural outflow of past scholarship, (2) to understand where the skills that will be learned throughout this course would likely be employed within the scientific process, (3) to understand how the scientific process is revealed within the structure of scientific articles, and consequently how to read them efficiently, (4) to learn to use a bibliographic management tool to organize articles and aid in preparing work cited pages, and (5) to learn to be proficient in graphing data.

A redesign of the first general chemistry lab session: Introducing the research process

255th National Meeting (2018)

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