The main goal of the Merit Workshop program is to develop a community of scholars among the participating students. The students help each other with difficult course problems, develop friendships based on common academic interests, and inspire each other to maintain a high level of commitment to excellence. Underrepresented minority students (African American, Latino, and Native American) in our case comprise ca. 13% of the student population on our campus but a smaller percentage of the technical majors. The Merit Workshop is intended to increase the retention of minority students and women in the sciences/math/engineering programs, and to encourage students to consider graduate study. Since its inception the program has targeted students in mainstream general chemistry and recently has expanded into the accelerated freshman sequence for chemical sciences majors and into the first-semester organic chemistry courses for majors and non-majors.

The Merit program utilizes the Uri Treisman model of collaborative/cooperative instruction methods. In this model, students do both the learning and the teaching among themselves. During each workshop students work together in small groups on specially selected, challenging problems. While workshop problems are based on the same material covered in the lectures, they are designed to stretch each student's abilities to the fullest extent. Students spend much of the workshop time collaborating in groups on the more difficult problems. The facilitator for the section stimulates student_student interactions by providing a challenging worksheet for the students and by circulating around the classroom giving positive feedback to the students as they work. The facilitator gives few answers on the mechanics of problem solving, but rather encourages the students to think out loud, giving everyone in the group a chance to interact and react to each student's thoughts. This peer teaching has proved to be very effective for exposing student misconceptions and promoting more conceptual understanding. Student-student interactions are further encouraged by having different groups of students compare their answers rather than giving the students the "right answers". We tell them there is no Solutions Manual for the problems in "real life". The group activities and the selected problems are designed to introduce both concepts and academic practices that can be of significant value later in either graduate school or in future career settings.

Merit students attend the same lectures and labs as all of the students in the course. In addition they meet twice weekly for two-hour active learning workshop sessions. These workshops are structured with 15-20 minutes of warm-up and beginning work, 60-90 minutes of intense group work and 15-20 cool-down activities and summation of the concepts and ideas. Merit students earn an extra credit hour for the additional time spent in workshops and the extra time expected of the students to study in groups outside the classroom. Students are individually invited to join the Merit workshop. Those exhibiting interest in the program are interviewed and then self-selected into the program. The Merit workshop is 60-70% minority, with the remaining students being non-minority students from small high schools and other students representing a cross-section of the non-minority population.

The Merit Workshop differs from traditional discussion sections in several important ways. The workshop is process oriented, not answer driven. Students are expected to work toward understanding, not simply to get the correct answers. Merit students accept more responsibility than traditional students. The Merit student teaches as well as learns and must come to class prepared to talk chemistry with other students. The Merit classroom is a social-academic community. Students interact on multiple levels and classmates form long-term friendships with others of similar academic interests. The environment stimulates an overlap of social and academic interactions that motivates students to spend more time on chemistry outside the classroom. Their classmates are friends and they call each other and provide support long after class is over. Merit students learn to question each other and themselves in an atmosphere of trust and respect.

The Merit program is labor intensive. The key to our success has been finding and training facilitators for the workshops. The role of the facilitator is to write challenging, appropriate worksheets, provide support and encouragement, ask questions to get students to interact and think out loud and manage the groups within the classroom. One of the main challenges of this approach is dealing with the student frustration caused by our not providing them with the "right answers". Once the facilitators and students see success (usually by the second or third hour exam) the enthusiasm for group study increases.

We have recently formed a partnership with Abbott Laboratories to provide both financial and professional support for the Merit Program. Abbott Labs is providing salary support for our teaching fellows and mentors for Merit students majoring in various technical fields. Our students will also have opportunities to become summer interns at Abbott Labs.

Our experience shows that Merit minority students perform significantly better academically than minority students enrolled in the same course who have not participated in the Merit program. In fact, Merit students often perform above the level of the students in the regular sections. Not only do the Merit minority students perform as well as or better than the nonminority students in our chemistry courses, but an espirit-de-corps develops in the group that encourages cooperative work outside the classroom and increases retention of these students in the scientific curricula. The Merit program successfully combats the tendency for minority students to isolate themselves, especially in courses where they are in the extreme minority.

Because we suspect that active learning has benefits for all students we are now incorporating active learning activities into many of our regular sections as well. We would be happy to hear from others who are experimenting with active learning in their programs.

Two sample questions from a worksheet for a Merit active learning session appear below. A complete sample worksheet is available as a supplement.

1. Assume you had a very magnified view of a solution of HCl that allowed you to "see" the HCl. Draw this magnified view. If you dropped in a piece of magnesium, the magnesium would disappear and hydrogen gas would be released. Draw this out using symbols to represent the elements, and write out the balanced equation.
2. You have a metallic sphere filled with air at 1 atm floating in water. If you evacuated all of the air (and the sphere kept its shape), how would the sphere move (up or down-a little or a lot-or not at all). EXPLAIN.