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In what year would you guess that these statements
appeared in this Journal?
Students can be classified as problem oriented or
answer oriented. The answer-oriented student ... does little
or no reflective thinking. ...To simply work a problem
for a student may not be educational at all. The
student should be taught the process used in the solution.
...My experience indicates that an answer-oriented attitude
can be changed. ...But one can't do much teaching of
problem-solving techniques and at the same time get on
with the day's lecture. ...Problem-solving technique is a
tool of learning. ...To teach it well should be about the
most rewarding academic activity. ...A year of stressing
methods of problem solving would alter the orientation
and motivation of many students we now call poor.
[Hint: the next article after this one described a
slide-rule technique for converting percent transmittance to absorbance.]
As it happens, all of the statements were part of a
provocative opinion piece by Hubert L. Youmans
(1) that appeared more than 25 years ago. As the
Journal begins its 75th year of publication, it is appropriate to consider how
much wisdom and experience have been concentrated into its
pages in the past, and how useful that information can be for
us today. Therefore, as a special feature in each issue of this
75th year, we are including a column titled "The More
Things Change"... that will provide gems from the
corresponding issues of 25, 50, and 75 years ago. It turns out that many
of the issues we debate today have been debated
before - sometimes long before, and often with greater wisdom than
we may bring to them now! It behooves us to devote some
of our time to looking back at what our predecessors in
chemical education were thinking and doing. "The More
Things Change" ...is designed to encourage us to do so.
Despite Youmans's provocative plea for change more
than a quarter century ago, an orientation toward answers
and away from the process of solving real problems is still
characteristic of most introductory college chemistry courses.
It may well extend through the undergraduate and even
the graduate curriculum. Over the past 20 years,
introductory textbooks have incorporated many features that once
were the purview of separate problem books for the less well
prepared student: example exercises whose worked-out
solutions leave nothing to the imagination; an almost infinite
number of chapter-end "problems", many of which are carbon
copies of each other or of examples worked out earlier; and
an attitude of "Let's get you through this morass of
gibberish." rather than "Let's see what new habits of the mind you
can develop by applying reason to these difficult problems."
And despite more recent pleas (2), textbook adopters continue
to demand, and textbook authors and publishers continue
to supply, features and content that may not accord with what has been established experimentally
regarding how students learn.
Why is this? This issue is a real
problemone that we cannot answer without thinking. Indeed the problem
has not been solved despite a good deal of
thinking. Part of the reason for our lack of success is that
it is much easier for all parties concerned to
maintain the status quo. To truly understand requires far more time
and effort from a student than does merely getting through with a
good grade. And if the course is moving along
rapidly, trying to understand may not be the best recipe for success. Students have developed strategies
that work for them, and most of us have not developed ways
of assessing progress that would show students that their
strategies have not resulted in true understanding. Indeed the
current system considers real problems on examinations to
be trick questions and unfair, because a student who has put
in the requisite study time might not catch on to the
solution within the time allotted. It is a lot easier and much less
time consuming for us as faculty to continue along the way
we are going than it would be if we were to try to find new
approaches that would facilitate true learning. And most of
us just don't have the time.
I suggest that during this 75th year of the
Journal, each of us resolve to choose one long-term problem of the sort
I have just described and spend some time each week or
each month thinking about how that problem could be
addressed more effectively. These pages are open to those who
would like to share their efforts.
Literature Cited
1. Youmans, H. L. Changing Answer-Oriented Students to
Problem-Oriented Thinkers. J. Chem. Educ.
1971, 48, 3878.
2. Gillespie, R. J. Reforming the General Chemistry
Textbook. J. Chem. Educ. 1997,
74, 4845.
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