The annual Variety in Chemistry Education/Physics Higher Education conference was on this week in Southampton. Some notes and thoughts are below.
Curly arrows
Physicists learned a lot about curly arrows at this conference. Nick Greeves‘ opening keynote spoke about the development of ChemTube3D – a stunning achievement – over 1000 HTML pages, mostly developed by UG students. News for those who know the site are that 3D curly arrow mechanisms are now part of the reaction mechanism visualisations, really beautiful visualisation of changing orbitals as a reaction proceeds for 30+ reactions, lovely visualisations of MOFs, direct links to/from various textbooks, and an app at the prototype stage. Nick explained that this has all been developed with small amounts of money from various agencies, including the HEA Physical Sciences Centre.
Mike Casey from UCD spoke about a resource at a much earlier stage of development; an interactive mechanism tutor. Students can choose a reaction type and then answer the question by drawing the mechanism – based on their answer they receive feedback. Version 2 is on the way with improved feedback, but I wondered if this feedback might include a link to the appropriate place in Chemtube3D, so that students could watch the associated visualisation as part of the feedback.
In the same session Robert Campbell spoke about his research on how A-level students answer organic chemistry questions. My understanding is that students tend to use rules of mechanisms (e.g. primary alkyl halides means it’s always SN2) without understanding the reason why; hence promoting rote learning. In a nice project situated in the context of cognitive load theory, Rob used Livescribe technology to investigate students reasoning. Looking forward to seeing this research in print.
Rob’s future work alluded to considering the video worked answers described by Stephen Barnes, also for A-level students. These demonstrated a simple but clever approach; using questions resembling A-level standard, asking students to complete them, providing video worked examples so students could self-assess, and then getting them to reflect on how they can improve. David Read mentioned that this model aligned with the work of Sadler, worth a read.
Laboratory work
Selfishly, I was really happy to see lots of talks about labs on the programme. Ian Bearden was the physics keynote, and he spoke about opening the laboratory course – meaning the removal of prescriptive and allowing students to develop their own procedures. Moving away from pure recipe is of course music to this audience’s ears and the talk was very well received. But you can’t please everyone – I would have loved to hear much more about what was done and the data involved, rather than the opening half of the talk about the rationale for doing so. A short discussion prompted this tweet from Felix Janeway, something we can agree on! But I will definitely be exploring this work more. Ian also mentioned that this approach is also part of physics modules taught to trainee teachers, which sounded a very good idea.
Jennifer Evans spoke about the prevalence of pre-labs in UK institutions following on from the Carnduff and Reid study in 2003. Surprisingly many don’t have any form of pre-lab work. It will be interesting to get a sense of what pre-lab work involves – is it theory or practice? Theory and practice were mentioned in a study from Oxford presented by Ruiqi Yu, an undergraduate student. This showed mixed messages on the purpose of practical work, surely something the academy need to agree on once and for all. There was also quite a nice poster from Oxford involving a simulation designed to teach experimental design, accessible at this link. This was also built by an undergraduate student. Cate Cropper from Liverpool gave a really useful talk on tablets in labs – exploring the nitty gritty of how they might work. Finally on labs, Jenny Slaughter gave an overview of the Bristol ChemLabs, which is neatly summarised in this EiC article, although the link to the HEA document has broken.
Other bites
- Gwen Lawrie (via Skype) and Glenn Hurst spoke about professional development; Gwen mentioned this site she has developed with Madeline Schultz and others to inform lecturers about PCK. Glenn spoke about a lovely project on training PhD students for laboratory teaching – details here. This reminds me of Barry Ryan‘s work at DIT.
- Kristy Turner gave an overview of the School Teacher Fellow model at Manchester, allowing her to work both at school and university with obvious benefits for both. Kristy looked forward to an army of Kristy’s, which would indeed be formidable, albeit quite scary. Even without that, the conference undoubtedly benefits from the presence of school teachers, as Rob’s talk, mentioned above, demonstrates.
- Rachel Koramoah gave a really great workshop on qualitative data analysis. Proving the interest in chemistry education research, this workshop filled up quickly. The post-it note method was demonstrated, which was interesting and will certainly explore more, but I hope to tease out a bit more detail on the data reduction step. This is the benefit of this model – the participants reduce the data for you – but I worry that this might in turn lead to loss of valuable data.
- Matthew Mears gave a great byte on the value of explicit signposting to textbooks using the R-D-L approach: Read (assign a reading); Do (Assign questions to try); Learn (assign questions to confirm understanding). Matt said setting it up takes about 30 minutes and he has seen marked improvements in student performance in comparison to other sections of the course.
- David Nutt won the best poster prize. His poster showed the results of eye-tracking experiments to demonstrate the value or not of an in-screen presenter. Very interesting results which I look forward to seeing in print.
The conference organisation was brilliant and thanks to Paul Duckmanton and Charles (Minion) Harrison for leading the organisation. Lots of happy but tired punters left on Friday afternoon.
I couldn’t attend everything, and other perspectives on the meeting with links etc can be found at links below. From Twitter, Barry Ryan’s presenation on NearPod seemed popular, along with the continuing amazingness of my colleagues in the Edinburgh Physics Education Research Group. One of their talks, by Anna Wood, is available online.