Students often struggle to make connections across disciplines and cite a lack of opportunity to make such connections. To address this issue, we are developing activities in the context of three-dimensional learning (core ideas, scientific practices, and crosscutting concepts) that provide students explicit opportunities to apply a core chemistry idea to explain biological phenomena. Here, we focus on an activity that asks students to incorporate the concept of entropy to explain the biological phenomenon of osmosis across an animal cell membrane. The first administration of the activity provided students in a second-semester general chemistry course two opportunities to apply the concept of entropy to explain osmosis (before and after scaffolding with discipline-specific, chemistry questions) to determine the impact of the scaffolding on students’ explanations. Additionally, we administered the activity in an introductory cell and molecular biology course to investigate how course history correlates with student ability to provide a sophisticated explanation for this phenomenon. This talk will discuss the findings from these data analyses as well as how the results of this research guides future implementation of such interdisciplinary activities.

Developing and evaluating an interdisciplinary activity: Making connections between entropy and osmosis

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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