A wealth of responsive and adaptive online homework systems is available to the modern chemistry instructor, and most have been shown to lead to meaningful gains in student achievement in introductory college chemistry courses. In contrast, there is a dearth of dynamic texts available that alone can claim any significant impact on meaningful learning to the same extent. Herein, results from an initial investigation of the effect of students’ participation with the dynamic electronic general and organic chemistry texts from Top Hat on final course grades is presented. Initial results from a combination of students participating in class and at home using smartphones and computers, point to a positive and significant effect of these interactive texts on student performance. There seems to be a general benefit to students’ use of these interactive texts, despite the data coming from several different instructors who recommended to their students to use the texts in a variety of different ways. Interestingly, the Top Hat texts used in this study are neither responsive nor adaptive, suggesting that the future addition of these features could lead to even greater gains in student engagement and achievement. The results from this study support the adoption of dynamic electronic texts as one way to engage students with content material, both in class and at home, towards increasing their achievement. Furthermore, these initial results add to the ongoing conversation about smartphones in the classroom as conduits supporting meaningful content engagement versus objects of distraction. These findings have implications for course design and for professional development activities with respect to use of technology in the modern chemistry classroom.

Impact of dynamic electronic texts on student achievement in general and organic chemistry

255th National Meeting (2018)

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