Students are often not able to integrate their science knowledge within a single course much less across different disciplines. The lack of explicit connections between science courses can lead students to think and treat these courses as a set of isolated ideas, which are often reinforced through assessments that encourage rote memorization and algorithmic skills over meaningful learning. The lack of explicit connections between science courses and knowledge can lead students to think and treat these courses as sets of isolated ideas; this compartmentalization is often reinforced through assessments that encourage rote memorization and algorithmic skills over meaningful learning. The focus of our project is to create, administer, and evaluate the effectiveness of activities that support students’ integration of knowledge across disciplines by incorporating core chemistry ideas with biological phenomena. The development of these activities was guided by the three dimensions outlined in the National Research Council’s Framework for K-12 Science Education: scientific practices, core disciplinary ideas, and crosscutting concepts. We used these cross-disciplinary activities to probe students’ abilities to use chemistry core ideas, such as stability & change and atomic/molecular structure & properties, to explain biological phenomena such as osmosis, ATP hydrolysis, ocean acidification, and DNA denaturation. Multiple activities have been administered and evaluated at two institutions and in a range of courses. In this presentation, we will discuss the lessons learned from the development and evaluation of these cross-disciplinary activities.

Lessons learned from the development, administration, and evaluation of cross-disciplinary activities for chemistry and biology students

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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