Over the years, there have been multiple calls to improve the quality of large introductory college "gateway" courses. Many of the resulting initiatives have been focused on transforming how faculty teach: increasing the number of active learning pedagogies, student-centered practices, or evidence-based instructional practices. While it is undoubtedly essential to engage students in learning, over the years, the absence of efforts that focus additionally on what we teach has been noted. Since 2016, researchers at our institutions have work on the transformation of the General Chemistry sequence by adopting Chemistry, Life, the Universe, and Everything (CLUE) – an established evidence-based general chemistry curriculum, which was developed and informed by the <i>Framework K-12 Science Education (Framework)</i>. CLUE consistently focuses on students' use of disciplinary knowledge (i.e., core ideas) to engage in scientific and engineering practices (i.e., Three-Dimensional Learning) and mechanistic reasoning. As part of our efforts, to help students develop a more robust understanding of core chemistry ideas and mechanistic reasoning, our current project focuses on expanding the internal adoption of CLUE at our institution and transforming the next course in the series – <i>Organic Chemistry, Life, the Universe and Everything</i> (OCLUE). In this presentation, the lessons learned from our efforts to adapt, pilot, and propagate these two curricula will be highlighted.

EXPAND: Adaptation of evidence-based curricula in chemistry gateway courses

ACS Spring 2022

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