Some references to 19 petitioners to Chemical Society and others This list was compiled for the purpose of creating/editing Wikipedia articles about Women in Chemistry. You can read a bit about the rationale for this here and more about the Women in Red project here. Bibliography notes Wikipedia link given if known; Some of these are described in RSC “Faces of Chemistry” – links given; CWTL = “Chemistry was their life”main biographic reference, see also index to that book; Creese 1991, tends to focus on scientific contribution in the context of the time and is also good for who they worked…
Category: Chemistry
The Laboratory as a Complex Learning Environment
One of the first challenges that emerge when considering teaching in laboratories is to define the kind of environment we are teaching in, and what that means for student learning. Laboratories differ significantly from lectures in terms of environment. Lectures tend to follow a well-established pattern – highly organised material is presented to learners in a fixed setting. While modern lectures incorporate some kind of activity, the focus is usually on whatever material is being presented, and learners rarely have to draw on any additional knowledge or skills outside what is under immediate consideration. Furthermore, learners have time (and often tutorials) after lectures…
How to do a literature review when studying chemistry education
It’s the time of the year to crank up the new projects. One challenge when aiming to do education research is finding some relevant literature. Often we become familiar with something of interest because we heard someone talk about it or we read about it somewhere. But this may mean that we don’t have many references or further reading that we can use to continue to explore the topic in more detail. So I am going to show how I generally do literature searches. I hope that my approach will show you how you can source a range of interesting…
A new review on pre-labs in chemistry
Much of my work over the last year has focussed on pre-labs. In our research, we are busy exploring the role of pre-labs and their impact on learning in the laboratory. In practice, I am very busy making a seemingly endless amount of pre-lab videos for my own teaching. These research and practice worlds collided when I wanted to answer the question: what makes for a good pre-lab? It’s taken a year of reading and writing and re-reading and re-writing to come up with some sensible answer, which is now published as a review. There are dozens of articles about…
A view from Down Under
I’ve spent the last two week in Australia thanks to a trip to the Royal Australian Chemical Institute 100th Annual Congress in Melbourne. I attended the Chemistry Education symposium. So what is keeping chemistry educators busy around this part of the world? There are a lot of similarities, but some differences. While we wrestle with the ripples of TEF and the totalitarian threat of learning gains, around here the acronym of fear is TLO: threshold learning outcomes. As I understand it, these are legally binding statements stating that university courses will ensure students will graduate with the stated outcomes. Institutions…
On the need for funding in UK Chemistry Higher Education
In 2014/2015, 18,495 people opted to study undergraduate chemistry at higher education in the UK. What do we know about their experience of learning chemistry? A search of Web of Science for those based in the UK publishing about chemistry education in the period 2014, 2015, 2016 was conducted. This returned 88 hits. An initial screening reduced this number to 71. Those removed included things like returns for a “Wales” hit that was New South Wales, or book chapters that weren’t about chemistry teaching in classrooms, or authors based in the UK but writing about non-UK classrooms. 71 Of these…
200th Blog Post
This is my 200th blog post. Now I should say that, while I am impressed with that number, given that it is over seven years since Róisín Donnelly and Muireann O’Keeffe gently broached the idea of starting a blog, it is not a fantastic output rate: to borrow Kevin Bridges joke about losing 4 stone over 10 years, I don’t think I’ll be writing a book on how to blog. I’m going to avoid the kind of post where I reflect on my blogging, think about what I’ve learned, and look with renewed wistful enthusiasm to the future: fail better! I’m also going…
Reflections on #MICER17
Two related themes emerged for me from the Methods in Chemistry Education Research meeting last week: confidence and iteration. Let’s start where we finished: Georgios Tsaparlis’ presentation gave an overview of his career studying problem solving. This work emerged out of Johnstone’s remarkable findings around working memory and mental demand (M-demand).1,2 Johnstone devised a simple formula – if the requirements of a task were within the capability of working memory, students would be able to process the task; if not, students would find it difficult. This proposal was borne out of the plots of performance against complexity (demand) which showed a…
Wikipedia and writing
Academics have a complicated relationship with Wikipedia. There’s a somewhat reluctant acknowledgement that Wikipedia is an enormously used resource, but as the graphical abstract accompanying this recent J Chem Ed article1 shows, WE ARE NOT TOO HAPPY ABOUT IT. Others have embraced the fact that Wikipedia is a well-used resource, and used this to frame writing assignments as part of chemistry coursework.2-4 There is also some very elegant work on teasing out understanding of students’ perceptions of Wikipedia for organic chemistry coursework.5 Inspired by a meeting with our University’s Wikimedian in Residence I decided to try my hand at creating…
Links to Back Issues of University Chemistry Education
Update 2021 – These PDF files now have a lovely new home on the RSC site: https://edu.rsc.org/resources/higher-education/university-chemistry-education I don’t know if I am missing something, but I have found it hard to locate past issues of University Chemistry Education, the predecessor to CERP. They are not linked on the RSC journal page. CERP arose out of a merger between U Chem Ed and CERAPIE, and it is the CERAPIE articles that are hosted in the CERP back issues. Confused? Yes. (More on all of this here) Anyway in searching and hunting old U Chem Ed articles, I have cracked the…