Bridge courses are designed to impact student’s academic success, often with short-term goals. In general, bridge courses provide participants with remediation instruction on discipline-specific content knowledge, like chemistry and mathematics, before enrollment in regular (semester-long) courses. As a consequence of the bridge course experience, it is expected that students’ dropout rates on those regular courses will decrease. However, bridge courses are often short (ten or fewer days) and packed with content, thus creating challenges for helping students sustain their learning gains over time, particularly for more than one semester. With the support of the NSF funded STEM Center at Sam Houston State University, we designed a course for entering chemistry students that consists of a one-week pre-semester intensive bridge component. The bridge course then flowed into a one-month co-curricular support component at the beginning of the regular academic semester. The primary goals of the bridge component of the course were to strengthen student academic preparedness, calibrated-self-efficacy, and foster networking, leading to a strong learning community. The goal of the co-curricular extension was to help students sustain and build upon the learning gains of the initial bridge component. We tracked participants’ academic performance in the introductory chemistry and math courses among several measures of success. The design process was initiated with backward design principles and continued with ongoing revision. The chemistry bridge course’s goals and design strategy will be presented and discussed, in contrast to the participants’ observed learning outcomes.

Integration of evidence-based learning strategies and instructional design in a chemistry bridge course at Sam Houston State University

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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