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Developing Insight and Intuition
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John W. Moore
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706-1396 |
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This issue is out of print. |
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The National Science Foundation recently announced a major program of support for large-scale, comprehensive curriculum reform projects in chemistry. As a consequence I have had lots of discussions with colleagues in my own department and with many from other departments about the ways in which reforms could be implemented. One of these discussions involved the possibility of making our courses much more interdisciplinary and much better integrated than they currently are. (For an earlier discussion of this same idea see the FIPSE Lecture, "Tooling Up for the 21st Century", J. Chem. Educ. 1989 66(1) 15.) We concluded that many of us will be deterred from teaching a new curriculum that is more interdisciplinary and integrated than before, because we will feel uncomfortable dealing with material that is far removed from the areas within which our research expertise lies. There is no doubt that carrying out research enriches teaching by providing myriad items of direct experience that can be called upon when we look for examples that will help students understand a topic better. Furthermore, the insights and intuition about chemical systems that we gain through research underlay all judgments we make about what to teach and how to help students learn it. Given the contributions that research makes to teaching, what do we do when faced with a subject like chemistry that is truly interdisciplinary and central to most of modern science? It makes sense to teach it in a very interdisciplinary way, but in a time of more and more research specialization, who among us has sufficiently broad experience to bring to life a variety of topics and enhance their presentation with direct personal experience? The number is almost certainly small, if not infinitesimal. As we were discussing this subject, a colleague remarked that it would be really helpful if there were some way that the kind of hands-on, specific experience that research gives us could be gained much more quickly and easily. Wouldn't it be nice if we had available a collection of research simulators that would give us access to whole fields of research in a down-to-earth way, but would require far less of our time than really carrying out the experiments. It seemed an obvious thing to try to do by means of a computer--perhaps with some kind of expert system. But of course it would also be a very difficult thing to do well enough to provide the meaningful insights and intuition that would be needed to make us really comfortable with an area of research. We thought about this briefly, but then our discussion got back onto the more immediate need of defining how we would go about setting up a new and better curriculum. As I worked on getting the software and written documentation for this issue ready to send to the disk duplicator and printer, the conversation about research simulators kept coming back to my mind. This issue's major program, KinWORKS by Dick Ramette, is a major step in the direction of the research simulator we were talking about. It provides a venue within which students must make many of the same kinds of decisions that research kineticists make when approaching a new chemical system. KinWORKS can be fun to use because it allows one to select one reaction from among a large number, design experiments that will elucidate the kinetic orders with respect to different reactants, determine the rate constant, and determine an activation energy. In other words, a student working with KinWORKS can set up a mini research project to find out about a particular reaction, and this can be done quickly and easily on the computer. KinWORKS appealed to me from the first time I saw it. My research background is in kinetics, and I was brought up on Ralph Pearson's dictum that the great thing about kinetics research was that you could apply the scientific method to each and every kinetic study, because each was a small research project. All of this fit right in with Dick Ramette's goals for his program. I tried it out in my second-semester general chemistry course last spring, and most students found that it prepared them rather well to do a real kinetic study in the laboratory later in the semester. I don't know how many of them played around more than they really had to, trying to figure out reactions that were not assigned, but I would wager that it was more than a few. I believe that this program made a solid contribution to improving student learning in my course, and I intend to use it on a regular basis to support the lecture and textbook material on kinetics. In fact, I made KinWORKS directly responsible for some of the learning students did. Neither lectures nor textbook deal directly with the integrated-rate-law method for analyzing kinetics data, but students are required to use that method in their laboratory work. That they were able to do so is directly attributable to their experience with KinWORKS. They worked through exercises similar to those given in the User Directions section of this manual, but they did it on their own, with only the information stored in KinWORKS' help screens to help them. Most students reported via questionnaires that the process of using KinWORKS to analyze simulated data enabled them to learn how to analyze their real data. KinWORKS was very helpful to them when it came time to analyze real laboratory data. KinWORKS is a long way from the research simulator that we were dreaming about in our curriculum reform discussion, but it is a start in the right direction. I can envision a future in which both students and faculty can learn about new research interactively and in much the same way they would learn from doing the real research. And with computerized tools they will be able to do it much faster and with much less effort! |
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Last Updated: April 26, 2001 Created: December 3, 1996 |
Created by: J. L. Holmes Comments to: jceonline@chem.wisc.edu |
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| © 1997 Division of Chemical Education, Inc., American Chemical Society. All rights reserved. | |