A study recently published in the Journal of Chemical Education, titled "A Tale of Two Pedagogical Strategies: Investigating Student Experience through a Three-Pillared General Chemistry Course Redesign," details a major change in how General Chemistry is taught at the University of Chicago. Authors Karina Kling, Shaunna McLeod, Hannah Lant, and Vera Dragisich aimed to enhance the student learning experience by implementing three key strategies: active learning, improved accessibility, and increased transparency. Their research demonstrates the effectiveness of these teaching methods and emphasizes the crucial role of student attitudes and beliefs in science education.
Senior Instructional Professor Vera Dragisich, who served as the senior author of the publication, described the impetus for the course redesign as a "momentous opportunity." She explained that the redesign was "an unprecedented decision by the department’s Teaching Matters Committee to fundamentally reshape how we had been teaching Chemistry for decades. I wanted to take advantage of this new possibility to benefit students.”
(Pictured: PhD student Karina Kling and Senior Instructional Professor Vera Dragisich)
This recognition spurred a collaborative research effort, initiated during a conversation between Dragisich and Karina Kling, a PhD student and IES Fellow in Psychology, to analyze student reactions to the new pedagogical methods implemented by Assistant Instructional Professors Shaunna McLeod and Hannah Lant.
The study points out that traditionally, student success in undergraduate General Chemistry courses is assessed by grades that determine future academic success. The group found that this method overlooks student attitudes and beliefs—factors critical to understanding and improving student experience in the General Chemistry course and their relationship with science. To challenge this oversight, the authors redesigned the course with a focus on implementing new key pedagogical elements meant to provide students with a more relatable educational experience.
Key Elements of the Course Redesign
The redesign of the General Chemistry sequence at the University of Chicago was guided by three evidence-backed pillars: active learning, accessibility, and transparency.
Active Learning
The concept of active learning involves educational approaches that prioritize student involvement in the learning process. In their study, the authors highlight two main strategies: promoting in-class interactive engagement and adaptive feedback on low-stakes online homework.
To promote active learning in the classroom, the instructors incorporated more in-class activities using Aktiv, an online educational platform designed to enhance STEM learning, particularly in chemistry, through interactive problems, visualizations, and tools that encourage active student engagement.
Shaunna McLeod, Assistant Instructional Professor and co-author of the study explained that prior to the redesign, they had already implemented certain active learning techniques to some degree. However, the redesign, specifically the integration of the Aktiv platform, allowed them to enhance these practices.
As McLeod noted, "the support of the online platform helped us formalize the process and offered a way of recording progress more consistently."
To promote active learning, online homework with immediate answer feedback was introduced using Aktiv's platform. Aktiv’s system, offering multiple attempts and swift evaluations, enabled students to learn directly from their errors as they worked, making homework a substantially more beneficial learning tool. This, according to McLeod, "lowered the stakes of the environment, allowing homework to become an even more formative assessment and learning experience in itself.” The study revealed that students favored Aktiv due to its accessible nature, specifically the ability to participate and respond to in-class questions using their phones, an Aktiv feature not available on other online homework platforms.
(Pictured: Assistant Instructional Professors Shaunna McLeod and Hannah Lant)
Accessibility
In the classroom context, accessibility means making learning resources easy to use and reducing obstacles for students new to chemistry. In the study, the group emphasized the use of open-access materials, citing research that demonstrates their positive impact on learning outcomes. To achieve this, the instructors adopted 'Chemistry: Atoms First 2e,' an open-resource textbook, to guide their redesigned courses.
Discussing the adoption of the new textbook, Assistant Instructional Professor Hannah Lant, who co-authored the study and collaborated with McLeod to redesign the course, acknowledged that the prior textbook assumed a rigorous math background, which created challenges for many students. To better accommodate students with diverse math backgrounds, the adoption of the “Atoms First” textbook facilitated a fundamental shift in how the course's core principles were taught. This change shifted away from a "thermodynamics-first framework," which is more focused on physics and mathematics, “towards an atoms-first approach, where we're talking about molecules and atoms to establish comprehension,” said Lant. They discovered that this approach made the material easier for a wider range of students to understand.
“With this story of our revamp,” said Lant, “it's not as if we're really trying out any sort of very cutting-edge pedagogical technique here. Rather, we are respecting the entire body of pedagogical literature on best practices and incorporating them to the best of our ability while being mindful that we have 300 to 400 students over several sections."
The authors found that by shifting to the 'Atoms-First' approach, the curriculum became more relevant and intuitive to the majority of students, many of whom are not chemistry majors.
Furthermore, choosing a free, open educational resource textbook also solved the problem of financial accessibility for course materials. New, hardcover General Chemistry textbooks often cost between one hundred and three hundred dollars or more, creating a significant burden for students.
Transparency
To enhance student understanding and fairness, the instructors prioritized transparency in their redesigned General Chemistry courses. In the redesigned General Chemistry courses, the professors collaborated to standardize assignments and exams between all lecture sections and used the platform Gradescope to provide clear, rubric-based feedback that positively framed student performance.
Recognizing the challenges faced by new college students in large lectures, McLeod said she emphasized transparency from the first day of class.
"For most students," she stated, "it is the first time they've ever been in a course this large. There are 350 students in a big lecture hall, who are then split up into two lecture sections. I think it can be overwhelming to figure out ‘how do I fit into this course’ and ‘where should I be going for support’?"
She explained that the first day included a course structure overview and a contact table to help students find answers to their questions. Included also were learning objectives for each chapter, which served as a study guide and exam preparation tool.
“These are the skills I want you to be able to apply by the end of the chapter,” says McLeod. “So when students are studying for the exam, I'm having them look at these skills sets and asking, ‘do I know how to solve these things? Do I need to do practice problems on these things?’ From the beginning I let them know that test questions will be related to this list, so this is what you should be preparing for.”
Lant describes how they implemented weekly 'Friday forecasts', providing students with course information for the upcoming week and insights into their pedagogical decisions. Each Friday, the instructors sent Canvas announcements detailing the following week's activities, drafting their message throughout the week to include relevant insights into the course structure. This continuous stream of communication invited students behind the curtain of the course design.
“It provided this opportunity for us to give more information about what we're thinking when we're structuring the course, rather than dumping that all out on the first day when covering the syllabus, where we may never talk about course design, what our thoughts are, or our pedagogical reasons for making certain decisions,” says Lant.
They found that increased communication with students became essential, as it significantly strengthened student engagement.
“We want to be as clear as possible about how we want them to use resources,” says McLeod, “so when we talk about homework using Aktiv's system, I explain that it’s set up this way because we don't expect them to get every question on their first attempt. The transparency of expectations, how we want them to engage with resources and how this course is designed, is the message that underscores everything.”
Outcomes of the Redesign
The primary motivation of the group’s study aimed to evaluate how the course redesign affected student outcomes, specifically self-efficacy and valuation of learning. Through data collection and student evaluations, the authors found that students in the redesigned course reported significantly higher self-efficacy, higher valuation of learning, and higher satisfaction with the skills and content learned.
When asked about the most impactful changes, Lant stated that “transparency and the aligning of sections really paid off the most for students,” adding that students felt they had “a supportive and fair learning environment.” These positive outcomes, highlighted by student feedback on transparency and support, directly address the well-known challenges of student attitudes in General Chemistry courses.
Vera Dragisich highlights the critical role of student voices in educational development, stating: “Having spent my career teaching, advising, and working in student support, I’ve always believed that students’ experiences and perspectives should inform how we understand learning. I wanted to hear directly from students about how they were making sense of their education. This project offered a meaningful and systematic way to elevate those voices and better understand how students were actually learning, beyond grades or formal assessments.”
It is well known that General Chemistry college courses are often perceived as 'weeder' courses, designed to filter students from specific majors, which undoubtedly lead to negative student attitudes toward chemistry education. However, the University of Chicago redesign study demonstrates that a student-centered approach that prioritizes student attitudes, beliefs, and needs, can effectively counter this. The study's results strongly indicate that implementing pedagogical elements like those used in the redesign are fundamental for creating a positive and effective learning environment, particularly in large introductory science courses.
Citation - A Tale of Two Pedagogical Strategies: Investigating Student Experience through a Three-Pillared General Chemistry Course Redesign, Karina A. Kling, Shaunna M. McLeod, Hannah M. C. Lant, and Vera Dragisich, Journal of Chemical Education, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.4c01281