Chemical Education Today
Award Address
Teaching Is More Than Lecturing and Learning Is More Than Memorizing1 2007 James Flack Norris Award by Diane M. Bunce
Background In the classroom, teaching and learning are intertwined and form their own feedback loop. The more we know about how students learn the better our teaching can become. The more effective our teaching, the more students will learn while they are in our courses. Studies of how learning takes place can tell us how the brain perceives information, processes it, and stores it in longterm memory. We know from cognitive psychology (1) that people have limited short-term memory and can only process a small number of chunks of information. Each chunk can be a single fact in the mind of a novice or an integrated series of facts and concepts for an expert. In a college setting, those facts and concepts are often delivered in a lecture format. Research has not yet given us a definitive answer on how long students can concentrate in a lecture setting (2), but the more often a teacher provides breaks that engage the student in some form of academic interaction during a lecture, the more students will stay alert and engaged (3, 4). Given that typical lectures last 50 minutes and cover two to four major concepts, it is little wonder that students are not able to stay continually engaged without such opportunities for interaction. In addition to paying attention in lecture, we expect and often tell students that to learn the material they should spend two to three times the length of the lecture going over the material outside of class. If learning takes place outside of class and if during this learning questions arise in the students’ minds, we expect them to review their notes, search the textbook, or come to office hours for help. This system of having the important material presented to students in lecture, their putting in time by themselves to learn it, and asking for help when needed has worked for many students through the years, but it has not worked for all. Students who have the potential to learn chemistry but are hindered by poor backgrounds in scientific or mathematical logic can panic in such a learning scenario. If this happens, students may resort to memorization to “get them through the test”, and gain no deep understanding. Often, even “successful” students learn the material through memorization or rely on their previously acquired mathematical ability to pass a test. True understanding of the chemistry presented is often not the students’ goal. Doing well on tests is (5). To investigate the situation from a student’s point of view in a beginning general chemistry course, we asked students during the first week of class in three different chemistry courses2 what their biggest fears were in studying chemistry. Seven weeks later we invited them in again and asked them what was working or not working and how they felt about chemistry now that the course was more than half over. 674
In this presentation I report on student comments and present teaching approaches and learning opportunities that address four things that can get in the way of student learning in general chemistry lecture: the structure of lectures, learning that takes place outside of class, communication between teacher and learner, and student ownership of the course. Possible solutions for each are presented. What Do Students Think/Worry about When Entering a Chemistry Course? On the first day of a course, the teacher is usually occupied with providing information about textbook purchases, the structure of the course (homework, quizzes, and tests), and determination of grades. Some courses may include information on the use of technology (online homework assignments or quizzes, or Web support for the course). For the teacher, it is an emotionally neutral day of presenting factual information. However, students experience something else this first day. They are often worried that their previous chemistry background is inadequate, or that they were unsuccessful in their previous chemistry course, or that they never took high school chemistry (but should have!). They may be concerned with their math ability or the adequacy of their study/test-taking skills. The first day, with all the rules and regulations, is not necessarily an emotionally neutral day for students. Listening to these fears can offer teachers insights into what their students bring to the study of chemistry, even if only from a small randomly selected subset of students. We invited students enrolled in three courses2 at Catholic University to share their fears of studying chemistry with us. Figure 1 has excerpts from their responses to our question, “What are you worried about as you start this chemistry course?”3 These quotes indicate that students want to do well and are ready to work hard in order to succeed. At the beginning of the course before frustration sets in, they fully intend to work hard, come to class every day, memorize all their notes, do all the assigned homework, attend office hours on a regular basis to ask for help, and even get a tutor. We, as teachers, would agree with most of what they intend to do except for memorizing information. We want students to understand chemistry, not just memorize isolated chemical facts. Our collective reasoning as teachers seems to be that if we provide the information in lecture and structure the course with homework assignments and quizzes/tests to assess their progress, they should be able to succeed. When students don’t do well, we typically ask if they held up their end of the bargain. We rarely question whether we structured the course to match their level of understanding and confusion.
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 86 No. 6 June 2009 • www.JCE.DivCHED.org • © Division of Chemical Education
Chemical Education Today
Lecture Even though it seems difficult for most people to stay engaged in a lecture format for 50 minutes (maybe even shorter in a large lecture hall), many of us organize our teaching around a 50-minute continuous presentation of material. The better organized we are, the more chemistry we believe we are able to “cover”. A continuous presentation of chemistry concepts, one after the other, gives students little time to process the information into long-term memory. Many students just give up trying to understand what is presented in lecture, concentrate on writing down every word that is written on the board, overhead, or PowerPoint slide, and resolve to try to make sense of it later. If their mind wanders during the lecture, then their notes are incomplete. Students who approach lecture this way usually take notes that represent well what the teacher presented in writing, but their notes do not include connections between diagrams or concepts that the teacher presented orally. Consequently the students do not understand how to connect the chemical facts and concepts. More importantly, learning is forced to take place outside the lecture. Students believe that they will learn the material when they have time to review the notes. This approach leaves no time in lecture for students to integrate new knowledge into their memory structures nor test that integration. When students do review the notes, they may have lost all recall of what connects the facts and concepts written in their notes, leading to a strategy of memorization rather than understanding for either succeeding or just surviving in the course.
At the start of the class: What are you worried about as you start this course?
Math— absolutely petrified of the math and the conversions.
photos by Dustin White
What’s in the Way of Student Success? It is true that as the semester progresses and the workload from other courses increases, students often fall behind in studying their notes, reading the textbook, and doing homework. If their study and time-management skills are not very good, students may experience more trouble than normal with these tasks. But beyond these issues some problems are built into typical course and lecture structures that add to students’ difficulties in learning chemistry. Some of these problems are discussed here.
I mix up the equations…Not knowing which equation to choose.
I tend to get caught up on the details. And rather than just seeing the big picture, I will stress over all the little things.
I study for hours and when I sit down I say… I don’t remember any of this…..Fear of not doing well and like wanting to do well.
Bonds—and we’re leaning about bonds now. I don’t understand bonds. I know they join together but why? I really just don’t understand bonds.
Figure 1. Some candid student responses at the beginning of a chemistry course.3
Study Time Students’ lives at college are often based on a 24-hour clock. They wake up when they need to (early for class, late when they can). They eat between other activities (before athletic practice or after a late lab). They sleep when nothing else is going on (nap between classes or when the dorm settles down around 1 or 2 a.m.). This means they often do homework at times when one-on-one help is unavailable. Most teachers schedule office hours between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., not 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. If students are
trying to learn chemistry outside class, they have a dilemma. Their notes may not be an adequate reflection of both facts and connections. Their textbook may be more advanced than their background in the subject, and their homework or online quizzes may include detailed applications of concepts they have not yet mastered. In some cases, they may have to work backward from the answer to the solution—in the process missing the overall plan to solve the problem. Learning then becomes survival, not intellectual growth.
© Division of Chemical Education • www.JCE.DivCHED.org • Vol. 86 No. 6 June 2009 • Journal of Chemical Education
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Chemical Education Today
Award Address
photo by author
Figure 2. Photograph of a clicker, used by each student in the class.
photo by author
Figure 3. The bar graph showing the frequency of each answer selected by students in class is projected for everyone to see. Annotations written on the tablet PC are used in discussion of the correct answer.
Communication
Some Solutions
In most courses communication is one-way with the teacher telling students what they need to know and announcing deadlines. A few students will email the teacher with specific questions and receive short, specific answers. A handful will venture in during office hours to ask questions face-to-face or come to office hours to “absorb knowledge”, hoping that the teacher will tell them which problems will be on the test and how to solve those problems. At best, only a small percentage of the class makes contact with the teacher to ask for specific help. In many cases, the students are too lost to formulate coherent questions. Some students worry that if they reveal how confused they are, the teacher’s opinion of them will be lowered. This ego-protecting strategy prevents some students from ever approaching the teacher in person or through email. Very few students are likely to venture beyond basic communication to discuss such topics as course organization. This one-way communication can prevent the teacher from sensing the concerns students have about learning; it can also hide misconceptions that have been fostered by a particular presentation of the material.
The problems of teaching and learning can be addressed in a coherent manner if we rely on what is known from research and theories about how students learn. This means that we adjust lectures to match the limited time people can concentrate on a topic, to give students time to integrate knowledge, and to test this integration in class. To better meet the 24-hour clock of college students, we can have technology on 24-hour demand to give them access to course requirements, calendars, materials, communication, and feedback on their progress. We can help move students away from focusing solely on grades to investing in the course and developing a deep understanding of the material. This can be accomplished through a planned, ego-protecting, two-way communication between student and teacher.
Ownership of the Course Students “know” that the course belongs to the teacher: the teacher determines policy, due dates, the difficulty of the tests, and the value of each assignment/test. The teacher also decides what material is important and how it will be presented. No one asks students what they need to learn. Typically they have no voice in how things are done, nor are they likely to volunteer any suggestions for fear that it would be viewed as impudent. In many courses, students really don’t know of any other way the course might be organized that would be more helpful. They have little experience in other approaches to learning besides lecture and in many cases are too busy trying to keep up with the material to think about what or how other approaches could be useful. This means that students are essentially forced into a consumer role in their own education with little power or opportunity to affect how a course is presented. 676
Lecture Three problems—limited attention span without engagement, lack of time for knowledge integration in lecture, and moving learning into the classroom—can be addressed by incorporating several innovations. ConcepTests (6, 7) have been used for a number of years to stop lecture momentarily and provide an opportunity to integrate new knowledge and test that integration. ConcepTests are questions that the teacher proposes to the class after presenting a concept. They are usually conceptually oriented multiple-choice questions. Students choose their answer by several methods: a show of hands, holding up a card with their choice of answer, or using a Personal Response System, a small electronic device often called a clicker (Figure 2). ConcepTests provide real-time information on how well the class understands a topic before the teacher moves on to the next concept. ConcepTests using clickers have several advantages over low-tech approaches. Clickers are small, personal devices that communicate via an RF receiver plugged into the teacher’s computer. Clicker software tallies student responses for classroom projection, providing teacher and class with a visual image of how many students have chosen each answer (Figure 3). Based on this information a teacher can decide to review the
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 86 No. 6 June 2009 • www.JCE.DivCHED.org • © Division of Chemical Education
Chemical Education Today
photo by Sarah Horstmann
material, helping to address misconceptions that may have led students to choose incorrect responses, or to proceed confidently with new material, being assured that students understand the concept just discussed. The clicker software saves individual student responses to each question so that a student’s progress can be discussed in private. This feature can be very useful when a student believes that he/she understood everything in lecture but just had trouble on tests. Student’s scores on daily clicker questions can be reviewed with the student to see whether this perception is valid. Appropriate suggestions for improvement can then be made.
Figure 4. A teaching assistant helps a group member during recitation.
Access to Materials 24 Hours a Day In every class, on any given day, some students might be sick, away for a college team game, or have some other pressing issue that keeps them from class. Class handouts have to be given to them personally when they return. A companion course Web site can serve as a repository for handouts and much else: a list of office hours for teaching assistants and teacher, a calendar of course due dates, the course syllabus, photographs of people in the class, online quizzes, online submission of assignments, a course discussion board, easy access to email with students in the course, and continuously updated grade information.
Figure 5. Teacher surveying a group at the end of a small group activity for their “Ah Ha” experience.
photo by Adrienne Black
Sometimes individual clicker questions are not enough to help students learn the material. Students need to “think aloud” in a supportive atmosphere about some of the chemistry concepts or tools that they don’t fully understand or cannot connect to other concepts. Providing opportunities for students to work in groups during class or recitation can help with this. Research has shown that learning is facilitated when students have a chance to think about difficult material with their peers in a guided small-group format (8, 9). Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) (10) has developed entire chemistry courses built on this philosophy. Teachers can introduce the POGIL approach into their classes in stages by beginning with recitation sections. Recitations often are “show-and-tell” problem-solving sessions where teachers or teaching assistants go over homework problems, and students passively take notes and count on learning a concept later. Small-group work in recitation can engage students more actively in applications of chemical concepts and thus involve them are more actively in the learning process (Figure 4). To reap the greatest benefit of small-group recitations, it is important to have each group report out some aspect of what they learned. We refer to these reports as “Ah Ha” experiences and often ask each group to report one “Ah Ha” experience they had as they worked through the assignment with their group (Figure 5). This switches the emphasis from “getting the right answer” to “understanding the concept behind the right answer”, then sharing that newfound knowledge with peers. In this approach both teacher and teaching assistants are busy during recitation visiting each group and helping them progress through the assignment, but it is the students who are doing the learning: they are doing it where and when the experts (teachers and teaching assistants) are available to help.
photo by Adrienne Black
Learning in a Non-Lecture Format
Figure 6. Teacher and students during a monthly Class Advisor y Board Meeting held in the teacher’s office.
To provide such access, most universities either have their own homegrown systems that use open-source programs, such as Moodle or Sakai (11–12), or subscribe to commercial content management programs, such as Blackboard or Desire2Learn (13–14). A companion course Web site makes students more responsible for their own learning because everything they need is easily accessible in one place. In our class, we also post a copy of each day’s annotated PowerPoint slides online to provide the required support for students with disabilities and to help students whose note-taking ability is inadequate. We suggest that students who have trouble taking notes or who prefer to follow the discussion in class without the distraction of taking notes, download these notes on a regular basis. Students are encouraged to analyze the completeness and accuracy of their own notes by comparing them with those posted online. For many students, this provides help in improving their notetaking skills.
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Chemical Education Today
Award Address Communication The goal of effective two-way communication is to give the students a voice in the administration and concept presentation within a course. This voice includes the opportunity to comment on what is working and what isn’t and to suggest other support or learning opportunities that might help them to succeed. This information is valuable for the teacher in making effective changes in the course to better support student learning. The teacher can complete the two-way communication by letting students know that their concerns have been taken seriously and if possible, describing new procedures to address these concerns. There is a risk to students, however, when openly sharing their opinions with the teacher. While students should become responsible for their own learning, they may feel that they will be branded as trouble makers or annoy the teacher—to their own personal detriment. It is also possible that a discussion can turn into a gripe session. One way to address both of these issues is to elect two or three student representatives to a Class Advisory Board. These representatives survey class members about their course concerns and meet with the teacher three or four times a semester to discuss these concerns (Figure 6). The minutes of the Class Advisory Board meetings can be posted on the companion course Web site so that all class members can see what issues were discussed and what resolutions were devised. The Class Advisory Board provides a mechanism for students to share ownership of the course with the teacher. Although the idea of the Class Advisory Board may sound as if it will open a Pandora’s Box of naïve complaints such as “the tests are too hard” or “the material is too difficult”, those who have tried it find that students take their responsibility seriously to help improve the course. Several issues raised in my meetings have dealt with teacher critiques: writing too low on the board to be seen by students in the back of the classroom, fear that there would not be a review session for the final (which had been planned but not yet announced), too little time allotted for clicker questions in class, etc. All of these were important to students and issues that the teacher was not aware of. All were easily solved. Assessment The type of assessment used in a course provides a clear indication of what the course goals truly are. No matter what the teacher says, tests are proof positive of whether the goals are memorization of chemical facts, plug-and-chug mathematical problem solving, or the ability to understand and apply the concepts of chemistry. Test questions must be written clearly and the expectations of the quality and depth of the answer must be delineated. If a teacher wants to test the underlying chemical principle behind a real world application, then the question must explicitly state that a detailed scientific answer is required. If students are taught conceptually but tested algorithmically, they will learn algorithmically. If they are taught and tested conceptually, they will strive to learn conceptually. Test questions send a clear message regarding the level and depth of understanding that is needed. If open-ended critical thinking or problem-solving questions are included on a test, then the requisite logic should be practiced in class in addressing other chemical issues. Students should be clear about what constitutes 678
an acceptable chemical argument both in terms of the chemistry included and the logic of the argument needed to adequately address the question. It is the teacher’s responsibility to set the bar on the chemistry understanding needed and to provide opportunities in a non-threatening environment for that understanding to be practiced before the testing situation. Does This Approach to Teaching Affect Students’ Ability To Learn? How? The title of this paper proposes that teaching is more than lecturing. Teaching truly must address the whole person and not just the nameless sea of faces that appear in lecture. This is a nice ideal for teachers with small classes, but may seem impossible for teachers with 50, 100, 200, or more students. However, changes in the structure of the course away from reliance on lecture as the main content delivery method toward having the teacher create an environment where learning can occur, can make the course content more accessible to students. Through 24-hour access to important information and online quizzing, students can better manage their time and numerous responsibilities both in and out of class. Students no longer have the excuse that they couldn’t access course materials in a timely fashion. Beyond access to needed information, the environment created by the teacher helps the student learn and shows the student that learning is more than memorizing unconnected facts. It also moves the responsibility for that learning from the teacher to the new student–teacher team. The use of clickers, where students can integrate and apply their new knowledge while in the classroom, demonstrates that their learning, not just their grade in the course, matters. Students in such courses are not seen as one of the crowd, but through the recording of their individual clicker responses are acknowledged as individual learners who are important. Two-way communication through email, Class Advisory Board representation, and accessibility of the meetings’ minutes helps students develop co-ownership of the course; such co-ownership is the starting point for the creation of a community of learners who are jointly engaged in the goal of learning chemistry. It is no longer a “teacher vs student” situation where the teacher is fighting to maintain high standards and the student is looking for a way to gain an easy A. Learning can be a joint endeavor focused on the student’s becoming able to truly learn chemistry concepts. The teacher’s role is to help the student by creating an environment where the student can learn, but it is the student’s responsibility to actually do the learning. Both lecture and small-group discussion provide students with different avenues to build their own understanding. Hand in hand, these two approaches help address the different needs of a majority of students in the class. How Do Students React to This Type of Course? Seven weeks into the course we invited students to tell us how they felt about chemistry at that point. Once again we had students from the same three courses2 volunteer to be interviewed. Not all students who participated in the first set of interviews were available during the second set of interviews.
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 86 No. 6 June 2009 • www.JCE.DivCHED.org • © Division of Chemical Education
Chemical Education Today
Seven weeks into the course: Now how do you feel about it? photos by Dustin White
I know now not to memorize it and how to approach it—not studying the night before.
I feel really confident at this point. … When I go into tests, I am so prepared and it’s been paying off.… I get so excited when I check on BlackBoard and I see the grade. I am really proud and it has really helped build my confidence…
Because now I realize it’s not the math I couldn’t do. It was setting it [the problem] up and knowing how to do it. The math itself is easy…
You can’t always rely on your memory…you have to be able to really know the material, be familiar with it and be comfortable with it…. If you can talk your way through it, you can get to the answer. (Recitation) If I have a question, like someone (in the group) has the answer and if someone has a question, then I know the answer. It is good just like to work it out together.
Time in class [which] is set aside to talk out the problems really helped me out a lot.
Figure 7. Some candid student responses in the middle of a chemistry course.3
Excerpts from what they told us appear in Figure 7; the full video is available on JCE Online.3 Conclusion Teaching is more than lecturing if the teacher accepts the challenge to create an environment (both in class/recitation and online) that is conducive to student learning. Creating such an atmosphere means removing false barriers to learning and shifting the responsibility of successful learning to the student. The new teaching/learning environment changes the dynamics of the course from a teacher-driven experience to one of a community of learners where both teacher and students have mutual control and responsibility for the course. The student’s role changes too. The student is challenged to accept more responsibility for his/her learning rather than thinking it is the teacher who is solely responsible for learning in the course. This shift also helps students move from blind memorization to a deeper understanding of chemistry. Learning is understood as something they are capable of accomplishing through their work and with help from the teacher. Learning is more than memorizing someone else’s words: learning is un-
derstanding and being able to use that understanding to answer new questions. With this vision of teaching and learning, students build their confidence in learning chemistry, experience chemistry learning as a human endeavor, and most importantly, learn that they can succeed through their own efforts. Acknowledgments The author is grateful for the help and support of the Northeast Section of the American Chemical Society; the chemistry students of Catholic University; Dustin White, Director of Video Services, The Catholic University of America; Jessica VandenPlas, Sarah Horstmann, and Adrienne Black, The Catholic University of America. Notes 1. This paper is derived from a talk given at the presentation of the James Flack Norris Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Teaching of Chemistry of the Northeastern Section of the American Chemical Society, held November 8, 2007, in Cambridge, MA.
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Chemical Education Today
Award Address 2. The three courses were Chemistry for Health Professions I– Inorganic; Chemistry for Health Professions II–Organic and Biochemistry; and Chemistry for Nonscience Majors (Chemistry in Context). 3. Full videos of the student interviews, both at the start of the class and seven weeks into it, are available as online material. All students granted permission for us to disseminate their views.
Literature Cited 1. Larkin, J.; McDermott, J.; Simon, D. P.; Simon, H. A. Science 1980, 208, 1335–1342. 2. Wilson, K.; Korn, J. H. Teaching of Psychology 2007, 34, 85–89. 3. Johnston, A. H.; Percival, F. Education in Chemistry 1976, 13, 49–50. 4. McKeachie, W. J. McKeachie's Teaching Tips, 11 ed.; Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 2002. 5 Bunce, D. M.; Gabel, D.; Samuel, J. J. Res. Sci. Teach. 1991, 28, 505–521. 6. Mazur, E. Peer Instruction: A User's Manual; Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 1997. 7. Landis, C. R.; Ellis, A. B.; Lisensky, G. C.; Lorenz, J. K.; Meeker, K.; Wamser, C. C. Chemistry ConcepTests: A Pathway to Interactive Classrooms; Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 2001. 8. Johnson, D. W.; Johnson, R. W.; Smith, K. A. Active Learning: Cooperation in the College Classroom; Interaction Book Co.: Edina, MN, 1998.
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9. Johnson, D. W.; Johnson, R. T. Cooperation and Competition: Theory and Research; Interaction Book Co.: Edina, MN, 1989. 10. POGIL: Process Orientated Guided Inquiry. http://www.pogil. org/ (accessed Feb 2009). 11. Information about Moodle, an open-source program, may be found at http://moodle.org (accessed Mar 2009). 12. Information about Sakai, an open-source program, may be found at http://sakaiproject.org/portal (accessed Mar 2009). 13. Information about Blackboard is at http://www.blackboard.com (accessed Feb 2009). 14. Information about Desire2Learn may be found at http://www. desire2learn.com/ (accessed Mar 2009).
Supporting JCE Online Material
http://www.jce.divched.org/Journal/Issues/2009/Jun/abs674.html Abstract and keywords Full text (PDF) with links to cited URLs and JCE articles Supplement: QuickTime videos of a meeting with the Class Advisory Board, interviews of students expressing fears at the beginning of the course, interviews of students at the end of the course, and a small group activity.
Diane M. Bunce is a member of the Chemistry Department, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC 20064;
[email protected].
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 86 No. 6 June 2009 • www.JCE.DivCHED.org • © Division of Chemical Education
