A growing body of research demonstrates that active learning in Instrumental lab improves student learning and engagement, but there is limited research into Instrumental lecture. Our goal is to determine if teaching using the primary literature instead of traditional lecture will result in students performing well in Instrumental lecture, learning to read the primary literature, and being more engaged and interested. Active learning is typically half of the 75-minute lecture period. During this time students work in two-student groups to either 1) give an oral presentation on new lecture material followed by a recent and related journal article, or 2) identify and propose how to solve an analytical problem of their interest. Faculty meet with students on each of these topics one-on-one before their presentations, and students who are presenting the lecture material not only learn the material themselves (hopefully in a deeper way), but also learn how to discuss science with others. A writing-intensive course, students write a short literature review (5-10 papers) about an analytical problem that they think of themselves about any area of their interest, and then write a short research proposal (with a budget for graduate students) about how they would solve the problem. With limited instrumentation in our laboratory this allows them to dream of real problems that they would be interested in and solve with unlimited instrumentation. Students learn to write a literature review paper, and learn to give oral presentations about course material and their own research ideas from the literature. This course incorporates Course Based Undergraduate Research as well as the Genius Hour (from Google) concept where students spend part of their time working on projects of their own interest. Ultimately, we endeavor to excite students about analytical chemistry and instrumentation in this way.

Active learning in instrumental analysis lecture by teaching through the literature

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ACS Spring 2023

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