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In many universities today, marked changes are taking place in the teaching of chemistry lecture and lab coursesIn recent years the teaching of undergraduate college chemistry has been the subject of intensive re-evaluation. The past five years may have been a time of greater soul-searching by chemistry faculty members than at any time in history.
Many reasons are given for the extraordinary self-criticism going on today in college chemistry departments- criticism concerned with both what is being taught and how it is being taught. Many chemistry professors say that this penetrating re-examination is almost entirely the result of faculty initiative. The faculty members, they say, recognize that major revisions in the chemistry curriculum and in methods of instruction have been long overdue and that vigorous efforts should be made to improve the effectiveness of chemistry teaching. Some professors, however, give special credit to student criticism and unrest for at least some of the revisions now being made in undergraduate chemistry courses.In many schools, one reason for the intensive reappraisal of the chemistry program is the declining enrollment of students desiring to become professional chemists. At one major eastern university, for example, the number of chemistry graduates has dropped from about 50 a year in the early 1960's to about 15 in the past two years. Why the precipitous decline? Might improvements in chemistry courses reverse the downtrend? 
In U.S. colleges and universities, this has not been merely a time of faculty self-examination but also of academic change. Dr. W. Thomas Lippincott, chemistry professor at Ohio State University, says, "More teachers have tried more new approaches to teaching chemistry in the past five years than in any comparable period in the past."
In their efforts to improve college chemistry teaching, faculty members have focused their attention on every aspect of the chemistry curriculum. In recent years, this concern has centered on such questions as: Should more be done to tailor various chemistry courses to the special needs of specific student groups? How can students be better prepared to solve intelligently the real-life chemical problems they will encounter in their professional careers?Are lecture courses as good as they should be? Are the theoretical aspects of chemistry being overemphasized, especially in freshman courses? Are laboratory courses worth all the time, money, and effort devoted to them? What traditional chemistry courses should be dropped or greatly modified? What new courses should be introduced? Should such conventional courses as general chemistry (primarily inorganic), organic chemistry, and physical chemistry be abandoned in favor of a total restructuring of the chemistry curriculum? 
Other questions: How should chemistry courses be revised to make them more relevant to student interests? How, if at
all, should chemistry curriculums be modified to make students more aware of the impact of science on society? How can the teaching of chemistry to nonscience majors be improved? How can schools do a better job of teaching chemistry to the underprepared students now flocking to many universities that are actively recruiting minority students, many of whom
are poorly prepared academically?Still other questions: How can chemistry departments make more effective use of some of the newer teaching aids, such as live television, videotapes , audiotapes, film loops, programed textbooks, computer-programed learning, and so on? Should the Keller plan or other programs for self-paced education be more widely used in chemistry teaching? Are chemistry lectures doomed to become obsolete? Can the undergraduate chemistry curriculum be successfully compressed into three years? How do chemistry students today differ from the ones the universities were training 10 or 15 years ago, and how should chemistry teaching be revised accordingly? Answers to the questions are complicated somewhat because they can relate to different types of students. Most freshman and sophomore chemistry students, for example, are not chemistry majors but premedical students, engineering students, nursing majors, physics and biology majors, education majors, veterinary students, agricultural students, and others, for whom chemistry is merely a required course or two but is not a prime vocational objective. Increasing enrollmentIn the past two years, many chemistry departments have been astounded by the phenomenal increase in the number of their freshman and sophomore students-an increase caused almost entirely by the sharp rise in the number of premedical students. At the same time, most schools have found that the number of their students wishing to become professional chemists has either remained fairly constant or, in more cases, has declined.Although it would be simple and neat to say that chemistry departments throughout the country are all changing in exactly the same way and at exactly the same rate, such is clearly not the case. Chemistry departments are well known for their wide-ranging diversity. Hence, it is difficult to generalize about how these departments are changing their teaching programs. 
Some chemistry departments are highly innovative. Others are only beginning the most preliminary discussions of program changes that other schools have had in effect for years. Various chemistry curriculum changes that some schools proclaim as the "wave of the future" are rejected by other schools as hogwash.
As an example of differing attitudes, the head of a chemistry department in one major U.S. city points with pride to the fact
that chemistry teaching in his school is becoming increasingly concerned with student needs and with adjusting the curriculum to meet these needs. On the other hand, the head of a chemistry department at another university in the same city flatly declares, "We teach subject -centered courses here, not child-centered courses! "Every chemistry department is a reflection of the views and personalities of its past and present faculty members. Every chemistry department is also strongly influenced by the size and nature of its student body. In a real sense, every chemistry department is unique. Yet, out of all this diversity, some general trends can be discerned-even if they are far from universal. 
In some universities, a definite tendency has developed to offer special chemistry courses for specific student groups, epending on their majors. In the past, in many schools, all students who had to satisfy a freshman chemistry requirement, for example, took the identical chemistry course. Now, there is a growing recognition that the cheinistry needs of chemistry majors, premedical students, biology majors, nursing majors, and others are not the same and that courses should be modified accordingly. The extent to which the freshman chemistry course is tailored to specific groups varies from school to school.Since 1965, American University has been offering one freshman chemistry course for chemistry majors, physics majors, and some of its premedical students and has given another freshman chemistry course for other science majors. In addition, the chemistry department offers a special freshman chemistry course for nursing majors, one for nonscience majors, and a one-year program in science for students majoring in elementary school education. Previously, the university gave only two introductory chemistry courses. Recently, the Johns Hopkins University chemistry department began teaching a separate freshman chemistry course to each of three groups: physical science majors (including chemistry majors), well-prepared premedical students, and less- well-prepared premedical students. Formerly, the department gave all three groups the same freshman course. The change was necessitated, the department says, partly by the sharply increased enrollment of premedical students. Before 1967 the University of Virginia gave only one freshman course in chemistry. Now, it gives four: one for chemistry, chemical engineering, and physics majors, one for premedical and predental students, one for nonchemical engineers and nurses, and another for nonscience majors. In 1968 the University of Virginia also subdivided its courses in both organic chemistry and physical chemistry. It now gives one course to chemistry majors and chemical engineers and another to premedical and predental students. "The idea," says Dr. Marcus 0. Workman, an assistant professor of chemistry at the university, "is to make the work more meaningful to each group." Adjusted to needsAll of these changes reflect the growing conviction of many professors that chemistry should not be taught on a take-it-or-leave-it basis as a rigid, if not sacred, discipline. Rather, chemistry courses should be adjusted to meet the needs of the students involved. A noticeable trend in many chemistry departments is to design courses so that the student becomes more problem oriented and less answer oriented. Professors want to do a better job of equipping the student to cope with realistic problems he has never seen before, instead of merely coming up with answers to questions that have already been thoroughlycovered in the text or lectures. Dr. Edward R. Thornton, professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, puts it this way: "What we want to do, in part, is to combat the so-called 'College Boards syndrome' in which the student has been indoctrinated to believe that his future success will depend largely on his ability to answer, as rapidly as possible, a barrage of multiple-choice questions, while adroitly skipping all the questions that are difficult."The trend toward a greater amount of problem solving is clearly evident in a growing number of laboratory courses in which the students, to an unprecedented degree, are called upon to deal with scientific problems on their own. The trend toward a bigger emphasis on problem solving is also quite obvious in an increasing number of courses (especially interdisciplinary courses) that employ the case-study approach in teaching. Research experience
Other schools are also moving in the direction of making their undergraduate laboratory courses more like a research experience and less like a meticulously defined exercise. At Johns Hopkins, most chemistry majors in the second semester of the freshman year (after taking one semester of physics laboratory) take an unstructured lab course called Chemical Principles. In this course, introduced in 1969 by Dr. Kokes, the students are given considerable leeway to do chemical work on their own initiative. Usually, no more than two students work on the same experiment at the same time. One student may be synthesizing a cobalt complex or other inorganic complex. Other curriculum changesIn many schools, a variety of other curriculum changes have been made in recent years. In 1969, MIT discontinued requiring that its incoming chemistry students take general chemistry. Now, almost all of MIT's chemistry students take organic hemistry in their freshman year. One reason for the change, a faculty member explains, was that the school decided that its freshmen had been so well prepared in their high school chemistry courses that giving them general chemistry in college would be an unnecessary repetition.In 1969, the University of Maryland's chemistry department began allowing its chemistry majors to concentrate on any one of a variety of fields in their junior and senior years. The student can choose any one of such fields as biochemistry, organic chemistry, geochemistry, instrumental analysis, environmental chemistry, or oceanography. He then takes anywhere from two to four courses in this area. Regardless of the option selected, however, the degree he receives is the same-a B.S. in chemistry. "By this procedure," says Dr. Joseph T. Vanderslice, chairman of the University of cMaryland's chemistry department, "the student tailors his studies to his own special scientific interests. The kids, we find, appreciate the flexibility this program offers." In 1967 the chemistry department at the University of Pennsylvania stopped offering a B.S. in chemistry and now gives only a B.A. Under the B.A. program, the student must take only 10 to 13 course units in chemistry (depending on whether the degree is given with or without honors), instead of the 15 chemistry course units required for the previous B.S. The change was made, Dr. Thornton says, primarily to allow the students to take a wider range of electives in chemistry and other subjects. Since 1962, entering students at Columbia who get high grades on an advanced placement examination in chemistry or on the university's own qualifying examination in chemistry can take the general chemistry course in one semester instead of two. In many other schools, such as Cornell, Northwestern, American University, and the University of Pennsylvania, entering students who get high scores on a qualifying examination can skip the freshman general chemistry course entirely. Quest for relevanceHigh on the list of educational concerns these days is, of course, the need for relevance. Teachers and students are both highly concerned that what is taught in classrooms and laboratories is meaningful and useful. Teachers and students sometimes disagree about what is really useful, and undergraduates occasionally confuse what is relevant with what is temporarily creating headlines. But the desirability of making education useful is accepted by almost everyone.In these troubled times, college courses are generally considered relevant if they place heavy stress on such current public problems as pollution, environmental improvement, chealth care, addictive drugs, birth-control pills, pesticides, new power sources, urban renewal, safer automobiles, and so on. Chemistry professors are as aware as anyone that many students are earnestly concerned about many of these areas. How, if at all, are chemistry curriculums being modified to help satisfy the desire of such students for more information on at least some of these problems? Some schools have introduced courses, if only minicourses, dealing with one or more of these issues. Most often, the course is centered on pollution control and environmental improvement. Many chemistry departments, however, have introduced no new courses on current societal concerns. Many professors say that they are injecting into their existing courses more material than ever that is of current public interest. Many chemistry professors point out, however, that this approach is nothing new. They have been using topics of current concern as illustrations or examples in their courses for years. Some chemistry teachers do not hesitate to declare that "this relevancy bit" is often overdone. "It's too much of a sop to the less motivated student," says- one chemistry professor. "Most of our students are sophisticated enough to handle abstract ideas without our having to trot out a lot of stuff from the morning newspapers." Says Dr. Edward McNelis, chairman of the chemistry department at NYUs Washington Square branch, "Students these days are sufficiently astute to know that cramming a bunch of relevant but unnecessary examples into a course is just plain corny. Relevant material can be used effectively, but it has to be done with restraint and not dragged in by the ears. " In the past few years, a dramatic upsurge of interest has occurred in the teaching of courses on the impact of science on society. Ohio State's Dr. Lippincott says that in the past two years the Journal of Chemical Education, of which he is editor, has received more manuscripts on this subject than on any other topic, with the exception of the use of computers in chemistry teaching. In the fall of 1971, the University of Pennsylvania's chemistry department introduced a one-semester course called Chemistry and Society, taught by Dr. Charles C. Price and Dr. Barry S. Cooperman. An elective open both to chemistry majors and nonmajors, the course emphasizes chemical principles and their application to technology, evolution, and ecology. Chemistry departments in other universities, such as Cornell, are now offering similar courses. Most of them reflect a widespread student interest in the action of chemicals on the environment and on the human body. These chemicals include everything from air pollutants and militarily used defoliants to phosphate detergents and hallucinogenic drugs. The course may deal not only with chemical hazards but with the highly beneficial effects of such chemicals as antibiotics, psychotherapeutic drugs, mold-inhibiting food additives, petroleum products, plastics, fertilizers, water-purification compounds, and agents that control crop-destroying insects. Three years ago, NYU's chemistry department began giving a required minicourse on science and society problems. Essentially a seminar, it is offered once a week every other week for students in their senior year. For the past several years, MIT has offered courses on the impact of science on society. These courses, however, are taught by the political science department, rather than by the chemistry department. |
