GENERAL CHEMISTRY LABORATORY CURRICULUM SURVEY

1. GENERAL CHEMISTRY LABORATORYCURRICULUM SURVEY Steven L Brown General Chemistry Lab Manager & Adjunct Lecturer Department of ChemistryUniversity of Arizona

2. Description A survey of general chemistry laboratory programs.  The questions are designed to solicit information about the curriculum currently being offered in all post-secondary chemistry programs.  The intent is to identify major trends and to share this information with those responsible for developing and maintaining general chemistry laboratory programs. The survey consists of 40 multiple choice questions and one essay question.

3. Who Participated (so far)? • 76 Colleges and Universities from across the US • 56 Public State Universities • 8 Private Universities • 12 Colleges • Average enrollment: 14,633 • http://quiz2.chem.arizona.edu/labsurvey/

4. Areas Covered I Structure II Determining Experiments III Current Content IV Cooperative Learning IV Scientific Writing V Educational Support Materials VI Other (funding, ideas, computer notebooks, assessment)

5. Part I: STRUCTURE.Seven questions about the relationship of lab to lecture and who does what in the lab portion of the course. • Lecture/lab one couse or two. Still about 50/50 • For your largest science and engineering lab course, how many hours per week are students in lab? 3.2 • For your largest science and engineering lab course, on average, how many hours per week do students spend outside of the lab on lab assignments? 2.6

7. Part II: DETERMINING EXPERIMENTSEight questions regarding who decides what experiments are performed and how they are presented to students. Who decides which experiments are performed and what is taught? • The Faculty as a whole 8 % • A subgroup of the faculty (e.g. a curriculum committee) 20 % • The person(s) responsible for the course 72 %

8. Where do your experiments come from?  • Original content written by someone in the department. 64 % • Adoption of a nationally pub. lab manual. 9 % • Prewritten labs from a publisher in a custom-assembled lab manual. 7 % • Copied or borrowed from other sources. 0 • Mixture of above. 20 % “The source or sources of the liberal studies course exercises is lost.”

9. How are the experiments presented to students?   • A nationally published lab manual. 9 % • A custom published lab manual using experiments provided by the publisher. 5 % • A custom published lab manual using locally generated experiments. 36 % • Local reproduction sold locally. 29 % • Local reproduction provided free to students (including posting to websites). 8 % • Mixture of above 13 %

10. 14. How frequently are experiments modified?    For a typical 2-semester sequence, what fraction of the experiments are modified in some way in an average year?   •   more than 50% 8 % •   25 - 50% 18 % •   10 - 25% 46 % •   less than 10%, but greater than 0 26 % •   None 1 %

11. Part III: CURRENT CONTENT.Three questions regarding curriculum.

12. Techniques taught

13. Old Favorites

14. Instructional approach:

15. Part IV: COOPERATIVE LEARNING.Three questions about the use of group work in lab. Working in the Lab

16. Doing Assignments

17. Grading students' work

18. 'They all receive the same grade if they allocate participation points equally. They must divy up to +/-10 points, the total of which must add up to zero. The total is adjusted up or down based upon agreed upon points. They sign off on participation points. If a person gets a -10 from the group grade, the TA will inform that person that he/she is to produce his/her own report until the group accepts them back into the group for the report. They can still participate as a member of the group during the lab. This has been working marginally.

19. (the other) Part IV: SCIENTIFIC WRITING.Six questions on the development of scientific writing skills. Do you require your students to keep a lab notebook?     71 % Yes 29 % No If your students are required to keep a notebook, how is it evaluated?

20. Teaching Writing

21. Level of Writing

22. Writing support

23. Part V: EDUCATIONAL SUPPORT MATERIALS.Seven questions about various materials used to support laboratory instruction.

24. Please indicate which computer interface for data collection, if any, your students use in your labs.

25. Do you require your students to use a data analysis tool to manipulate the measurements they make in lab? If so, which of the following? (sums to more than 100% due to multiple responses.)

26. Part VI: OTHER.Six random questions on a variety of topics.

27. Where do you get new ideas for chemistry lab education? (ranked)

30. What kind of data do you use to determine the success of your laboratory classes?  (Sum exceeds 100 due to multiple responses).

31. Briefly describe the trend(s) that you believe will most significantly change the way your laboratory program will be run in the next 3-5 years.

32. We also just like to change things up. It keeps the faculty fresh. • The shift from chemistry to biochemistry as the "central science“ • We are just starting a program to develop prelab videos • The basic idea of general chemistry is basic chemistry, and most automation automates out precisely what we want to teach • We need to keep students interested and engaged while providing the lab skills their career paths expect them to have

33. We chemical educators face a challenge of not bowing to student pressure to make things easy and fun. • Student preparation in high school is getting poorer by the year. At some point, we either have to fail more people, or dumb down the material. I wish neither were necessary. • More online course management. • More computer molecular modeling. • EPA, RICRA, etc. regulations on waste management, safety, etc. will force us to NOT offer wet general chemistry laboratories, we will have to use computer simulations.

34. Acknowledgements • Funding for this survey has been provided by Hayden-McNeil Publishing, Inc. • The Department of Chemistry, University of Arizona. • The 76 individuals who took the time to complete the survey.