Chemistry is difficult to learn. Walk into any chemistry classroom, and you’ll be soon confronted with many abstract concepts. Abstract ideas have no physical form, and as a result, they are difficult to understand.
The author explains how she assigns roles for her students while completing laboratory work. The lab activity is designed to allow students to explore the use of indicators. It serves as an introduction to acids, bases and pH.
This post is the second installment in a series called “SBG Hacks". In this part, I will explain my automated reassessment system.
Developing PCK requires a certain level of subject matter knowledge, and teachers have a different understanding of subject matter than a person who specializes in that same field. A chemistry teacher and a ‘practicing’ chemist both have subject matter knowledge in chemistry; however, the knowledge is applied differently.
Lauren Stewart shares a hack she uses in her standards based grading (SBG) classroom to help things run more smoothly.
Like many members of the ChemEd X community, I am working with colleagues to teach and assess the Next Generation Science Standards in our high school’s general chemistry course. We are invested in engaging our students in Three-Dimensional Learning. This article aims to introduce readers to four of the high-impact shifts in mindset and practices we believe are helping our students learn to be better scientists.
This strategy has been very helpful in establishing relevance to topics taught and in making connections between topics taught within a unit. It also provides a way for students to ask questions and make written explanations of phenomena, which are “Science and Engineering Practices” of NGSS.
Given a guiding question, students determined what they wanted to test, did the experiment and got their CER boards ready for review. Instead of a regular argumentation session, we had a glow and grow session, where students had to provide positive and negative feedback for each board.
A paper that is peer reviewed multiple times garners enormous amounts of feedback to the student that one teacher cannot provide. This site offers a manageable system to do just that without overwhelming the teacher with the task of grading.
A few years ago, the faculty in our department at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania decided to switch to an atoms first approach to the General Chemistry course. We took advantage of this change to systematically redesign the first semester of the laboratory curriculum to be a true “laboratory course” that focuses on laboratory practices, techniques, and equipment rather than on chemical theory.
