In the early 1970s, the Faculty of WPI approved implementation of an inspired educational approach that heavily integrates project work into our entire curriculum. The guiding pillars of the “WPI Plan” are to engage both theory and practice. To bring our general chemistry courses more in line with the Plan, we instituted a sweeping redesign focused mainly on introducing high-impact project work into the laboratory experience. This moved students away from robotically following protocols and shifted the focus to modeling an authentic experience in a chemistry laboratory. We begin each course with a series of Skills Challenges that task students with goals that build experience using glassware and instrumentation correctly, reproducibly collecting data, and thinking creatively to solve problems. Students may repeat experiments, and performance is evaluated based on relative standard deviation and accuracy of their results. Following this, students are challenged with a series of “mini projects” where they conduct extensive literature research and formulate protocols and experimental strategies as a team. Students are only provided with specific goals and the teams must determine the best method of accomplishing them. To support this, we deploy a robust feedback loop involving early online submissions of protocols and safety analysis, online and in-person Faculty feedback, and active peer-learning sessions in weekly conference meetings that include data analysis and critical questioning of experiments in real time. Key components in this approach are a healthy increase in contact hours (up to six scheduled lab hours per week) and an Open Lab day, where students can reserve time slots to repeat experiments or attempt new ones, highlighting the importance of, and responding appropriately to, failed experiments. Students overwhelmingly have demonstrated more engagement and time-on-task than in our previous, more traditional courses; their sense of ownership of each step of the process was evident. This approach to teaching general chemistry laboratories can be readily deployed at other institutions. Although a good deal of buy-in from students and faculty members to support it is essential, it does not require great additional investment of resources. However, it does represent a way to better meet learning outcomes and enable students to delve deeper into authentic experiences in chemistry, which we feel has been a great improvement to our course series.

Integrating authentic research, peer learning, and high-impact project work into the general chemistry laboratory

256th National Meeting (2018)

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