In February I gave my Inaugural Lecture to celebrate the awarding of the Chair in Chemistry Education. The lecture was recorded, and I am grateful to the folks at Academic Audio Transcription who have undertaken the very tough task of transcribing my very strange accent, so that I can now share the lecture with subtitles. As well as introduction (~4 mins) the lecture is in three parts – learning in the lab, a bit about me, and work around student inclusion. If you are interested in some of the aspects mentioned in this lecture, some follow-up links are below, which themselves…
Category: Chemistry
Managing the open-book exam process
At Edinburgh, we are mostly moving to replacing our 3 hour exams with open book exams. We had initially intended these to be within 24 hour timeframes, but the University has mandated 48. Otherwise, things are as described in the previous post. So students will need to access an exam paper from a specific “start time” and submit their written answers no later than 48 hours than that start time. Easy! Having looked through the various options, I am going with the following 5 step plan based on Blackboard Assignments (rather than Turnitin), described below in terms of front of…
Supporting student study in the “pivot” online
As mentioned in last post, we are focussing our current efforts on two strands – maintaining and promoting academic focus, and being active in student support, the second aspect being led by m’colleague Chris Mowat. In terms of academic focus, we are moving our closed book exams to open book. Of course this seems “easier”, but I think brings new challenges for students in their study. All that study time spent learning things off doesn’t seem as important now, and we are moving our focus to asking students to think about what questions are asking, showing their understanding concisely in answers,…
Looking back on ten years of Chemistry Education Research and Practice
Over the last 10 years from 2010 – 2019, Chemistry Education Research and Practice, a free-to-access journal published by the RSC (of which I am currently Editor) has published 631 articles, which have been cited 5246 times (data from Web of Science). So what has been “hot” this last decade? It seems whatever way you cut it, it was flipped learning and organic chemistry… Below I’ve cut the citation statistics a few ways – these comments are based on citations rather than judgement on the work itself. In terms of number of citations, Keith Taber’s perspective on the chemistry triplet tops the…
A new book on teaching chemistry in higher education
This summer I published a very special book on teaching chemistry in higher education. Each chapter in the book contains some approach on teaching chemistry, written by someone who has implemented that approach more than once in their own setting. Chapters explain how the approaches are grounded in the literature, explain the rationale for the approach, and then go on to give some detail on the implementation and outcomes of the approach. Thus the book intends to be useful to those new or reconsidering approaches to teaching chemistry in higher education, as well as those involved in education development. While…
A Framework for Learning in the Chemistry Laboratory
What is the key literature on chemistry laboratory education? What kinds of factors should be considered when designing laboratory curricula? An invite for a journal special issue gave me the final push to write something I’ve wanted to write for a long time addressing these questions. When writing it, I have in mind “typical academics”, who may be doing learning and teaching courses or people interested in broadening their reading about chemistry education. This special issue was a good place for it because it is a special issue in a “normal” chemistry journal, with the theme of chemistry education. Therefore…
Video: The laboratory as a complex learning environment
I was invited to contribute to the TEAM conference in March but couldn’t make it in person, so sent this screencast. IT outlines my current thinking about the value of using a complex learning framework for laboratory education and what that means in terms of supporting student learning
Lessons from running webinars
We are now coming up to half way for the webinar series I launched this year. Webinars run monthly, thereabouts, and are on the theme of chemistry education research. I’ve never hosted webinars before so it has been interesting, and when the technology decides not to work, heart-stopping. Useful responses to a post (plea) requesting ideas/guidance are listed here. I think I have incorporated most of the suggestions. Some thoughts on format What’s been a real pleasure has been the opportunity to hear speakers I love give a talk. This year, because I was testing the water, I chose speakers who…
A model for the (chemistry) practical curriculum
Yesterday’s post discussed our recent work in thinking about how to build experimental design into the teaching laboratory. This post is related, but aims to think about the overall laboratory teaching curriculum. I’ve been thinking about this and have Tina Overton’s mantra ringing in my head: what do we want the students to be at the end of it? So, what do we want students to be at the end of a practical curriculum? I think many of us will have varying answers, but there’s a couple of broad themes, which we can assemble thanks to the likes of Tamir…
Rethinking laboratory education: unfinished recipes
A great dilemma lies at the heart of practical education. We wish to introduce students to the nature and practices of scientific enquiry, as it might be carried out by scientists. Learning by mimicking these processes, it is argued, will imbue our students with an understanding of scientific approaches, and thus they will learn the practices of science. Often such approaches can be given within a particular real-life context, which can be motivating. I know this argument well, and indeed have advocated this framework.1 However, problems emerge. Let’s consider two. The first is that these approaches often conflate learning how…