Like many faculty, my memories of upper-level Chemistry courses as an student are of taking notes during lecture and completing problem sets at home.  Today, however, the STEM community knows that pure lecture fails to engage the students and are not the best way for most students to learn.  In this talk, I will share a strategy to center undergraduate and graduate Analytical Chemistry courses around daily interactive activities and a focus on mastery rather than performance.  This strategy was informed by the Analytical Sciences Digital Library training workshop and associated collection of activities.  After a very brief introductory lecture, students work in small groups on worksheets that guide them through the material step by step.  In this model, the instructor’s role is to construct or adapt well-designed activities in advance, then circulate the room to provide feedback and prompt deeper thinking during class, and finally to go over the correct approach to the problems at the end of the session. I have found that this active learning approach leads to a strong grasp of fundamentals and ability to consider and apply core concepts to new problems, including for topics such as the analytical method, spectroscopy, separations, electrochemistry, mass spectrometry, diffusion, and bioanalytical immunoassays.  However, it does require a reduction in the sheer number of topics that are covered in a semester.  In addition, I will share success and my ongoing journey with an assessment strategy known as Specifications (Specs) Grading, in which student work is graded categorically as Meeting Specs, Progressing, or Incomplete, and students are given chances to revise their work to gain mastery of the material.  Anonymous student surveys and representative exam performance will be presented as a case-study, suggesting that this approach leads to high student engagement and deep learning of Analytical Chemistry.

Designing an active-learning analytical chemistry course from the ground up

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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