As students in General Chemistry prepared for today's midterm, freshman dormitory halls echoed with standard complaints about the difficulty of kinetic reactions and stoichiometry.
Last year, when professor James Bonk stopped teaching the class after 38 years, some students had more substantial issues to complain about. Faculty members struggling with how to fill Bonk's shoes decided to pioneer a new method of teaching - one that introduced chemistry in a less abstract manner.
"We wanted to bring modern chemistry into the introductory courses rather than teach it how it was 50 years ago," said Berndt Mueller, dean of the natural sciences. "The major challenge is how to do that in the best way and how not to base it on one person."
Bonk, who had personified introductory chemistry for almost four decades, stepped back from the curriculum development process. "I've basically put earplugs in and a blindfold on," he said. "I didn't want to push my ideas onto [the new instructors]."
Chemistry faculty collaborated to design a course focused on exposing students to real-world applications of chemistry rather than textbook computations and verification labs. Six faculty members would team-teach the course to 200 students over both semesters, with each professor using a real-life scenario to discuss fundamental chemical concepts. Students in other sections of the course would take a traditionally-structured class.
"What we wanted to do was project-based learning," said John Simon, chair of the department. "We would focus it around a set of problems rather than a set of textbooks."
However, the professors ran into problems at the beginning of the semester when Simon, who was scheduled to teach the second unit, was delayed in Europe for several weeks following the Sept. 11 attacks. The entire class needed to be restructured at the last minute, he said.
"The four of us [teaching the class first semester] sort of agreed how it would all link together," he said. "After rearranging, there was no way to tie it all together."
Students in the case-based class said they felt the effects of the shake-up.
"It was so abstract," said Debbie Linder, a sophomore who took the class last year. "You would talk about gasses and you would go over gasses and then the test would be about the ozone layer. It was a mess."
Others complained to both professors and administrators that the material in the case-based class was much harder than that in the more traditional section. They said they felt like "guinea pigs."
"The problem was that the students were not aware that this was being done," said Ross Widenhoefer, assistant professor of chemistry. "I think what was a bad idea was forcing people into that class with no idea what they were getting into."
No class description forewarned students that the two classes would be structured differently and students could not choose one over the other. The two classes were supposed to be equivalent in content despite their differences in approach.
"The hope was that everyone would get the same information in the end, but apparently some students weren't ready for this," said Richard MacPhail, associate professor of chemistry.
When second semester arrived, Professor of Chemistry Linda McGown took over coordination of the class and began to teach her portion with a more textbook-oriented approach. Simon said he did not discover that McGown had elected not to use a case-based approach until several weeks into the semester.
McGown had always intended to teach her portion of the class traditionally because of her lack of experience teaching low-level undergraduate classes, she said.
"[Simon] had indicated that we could teach as we saw best," McGown noted. "I chose for myself to go by the book. There were no meetings where we sat down and said this is the way we were going to do it and then I diverted."
McGown added that she supported the concept of the case-based approach.
Despite the poor student response to the class, the chemistry department remains committed to developing a case-based chemistry course.
"I maintain that students have no idea how freshman chemistry should be taught," Simon said. "We came pretty close to doing it exactly the same way this year."
Instead, the department has taken a year to re-group and evaluate the program. General Chemistry is currently being traditionally taught, and faculty members are discussing how to best revive the case-based chemistry class, but probably on a smaller scale to allow for closer faculty-student interaction.
"There were some students who got a lot out of it, but they've been drowned out by the more vocal students who didn't like it," Widenhoefer said. "If you ever want to develop more effective classes, you have to try these things."
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