Spring 2008 CONFCHEM |
Chemistry at the National Science Digital LibraryAn on-line conference, April - June 2008 |
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| Abstracts | Papers | Instructions | Discussion Archive | |
Spring 2008 CONFCHEM |
Chemistry at the National Science Digital LibraryAn on-line conference, April - June 2008 |
|||
| Abstracts | Papers | Instructions | Discussion Archive | |
Ji-Young Chong1,2 & Maren Pink2
(1) Instructional Systems Technology, School of Education, Indiana University and
(2) Molecular Structure Center, Chemistry Department, Indiana University.
The Reciprocal Net Common Molecules provide teachers and learners with access to a digital collection of molecular structures that has been developed as a part of the National Science Digital Library project by the National Science Foundation. Our educational modules utilize the collection and emphasize student-centered learning that aims to motivate students with tangible and visible objects familiar to them in exploratory environments. The modules can be used by all age groups and experience levels. They are scalable to different levels of knowledge and experience. However, the investigative and student-centered, inquiry-based discovery does not limit the learner to a certain experience level. It rather allows the student to go beyond prior expertise and acquire new knowledge. This paper summarizes the history of the educational part of the Reciprocal Net project and the rationale for the development of educational modules as visually enticing and quest-inspiring entryways into the database. We will also discuss future extension of the project.
Chemistry is commonly perceived as a difficult or boring subject and its relation to everyday life is often not made (1, 2). Recent studies found that knowledge transfer is poor in teaching chemistry (3). Students fail to solve problems that require using the same concepts in situations that are different from those originally provided. Also, students do not feel a necessity or sense of why they are learning the material required in the class. Indeed, abstract concepts are taught in chemistry together with new vocabulary and a whole new language of symbols and equations. Moreover, "chemophobia" persists into the adult life. For example, with environmental concerns involving chemistry (e.g., pollution or climate change) hitting the headlines on a daily basis, people develop an apathy or aversion to the topic rather than being stimulated to learn more and become publicly engaged. Research suggests that providing students with a meaningful context of chemical knowledge may improve comprehension and dispel aversion to the subject (3 - 6).
Not only students, but also educators are challenged when teaching the subject because of limitations in resources and tools in secondary school classroom settings. Studies of the educational environment have reported that students' science classroom experience strongly relates to their attitude toward science (7 - 10). When schools lack class-complementing materials and students' learning is not fully supported in the classroom, they may not desire or be able to go further in the areas of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Moreover, the teaching of STEM is becoming more and more challenging because of rapidly changing knowledge in the areas. Advances in the fields often cannot be taught using standard textbooks and here the Internet becomes a major provider of current information. Relying on Internet sources, however, is risky and difficult for teachers as the sources might not be trustworthy and are often volatile or unconsolidated. Scientists at universities share the responsibility to educate at all levels and actively nurture education in their fields. They are in a unique position to assemble expert-reviewed knowledge-bases within their universities and at government sponsored institutions such as the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) (11), which serves as a discussion forum and compiles valuable learning material at various learner levels.
New pedagogical approaches (12) are needed to engage learners with the scientific experts and the academic community. Besides outreach activities such as open houses and public lectures, digital learning modules, such as games are significantly helping to counter disinterest in science by offering interactive, inquiry-based learning. With purposefully designed tools that allow for "click and explore" rather than "click and wander off," students' interest and engagement can be secured using modern, digital environments that put forward issues relevant to their life. As a consequence, scientific literacy and a broader understanding of their surroundings is facilitated and science and technology are placed context.
The award-winning Common Molecules collection (13, 14), developed at Indiana University, is the educational part of a larger, distributed structural database, the Reciprocal Net (15), which currently encompasses about 4,000 publicly viewable structures of chemicals. The content development and web design team of the Common Molecules collection included not only specialists in the field, but also non-chemists. In fact, undergraduate and graduate students from various disciplines, liberal arts and science backgrounds, brought a youthful view to the project and had significant input on the appearance of the website and content choices. The Common Molecules collection is also part of the NSDL. It assembles information and provides interactive, three-dimensional presentations of chemicals that are considered common based on their general use or their presence in our bodies and the world around us. Also included are chemicals that spark current interest because of their fascinating structural properties and innovative applications or because their mentioning in recent news headlines. Presently, the collection comprises over 600 molecular and extended structures that can be browsed alphabetically or by category. The collection can also be searched and requests can be made to the scientific team to add molecules.
Applets allow for casual viewing as well as scientific interrogation and rendering quality images of a chosen compound (16). Three versions of the applet differing in utility and sophistication accommodate various browsers and operating systems. Students can rotate, scale, translate, and view the molecular structure of a chemical. Visualization can further be customized by electing, for example, mono or stereo views of line drawings, ball-and-stick models, or space-filled models. Additionally, the molecular geometry, including bond distances and angles can be measured. Photorealistic models can be rendered for an orientation and customization chosen by the student and downloaded in various common formats. Descriptive paragraphs that may include history, usage, discovery, health and pollution concerns and more, complete the information on the chemical. They are written with a layperson in mind although scientific details are available for the advanced learner.
The Common Molecules database content was designed to be reusable (17) in diverse contexts, i.e. learning activities for different age groups. Drawing upon this vast collection of molecules, we renovated an earlier implemented Symmetry Tutorial (18) that had been designed for a narrow target group, college-level students, and we set out to develop new, layered Reciprocal Net Learning Modules (19) with a broader scope, in an effort to stimulate students' comprehension and interest in chemistry and crystallography and making the learning about these topics attractive, relevant, and easy for all age and educational levels.
The Reciprocal Net Learning Modules provide a visually pleasing entry into the Common Molecules collection and present it in a meaningful, pedagogically-layered context, scalable to the interest or prior knowledge of the learner. They aim to present secondary school classrooms and the interested adult learner with situations that relate to their life or class work. We identified specific objectives associated with students' learning. First, our modules should provide students with content and context pertinent to a class or current topics. Second, the modules should stimulate students' curiosity so that they will explore new content, other molecules, on their own. Third, the modules should allow students with various levels of knowledge to learn and experience at their own pace, thus improving their scientific literacy step-by-step as they are returning to the module to learn more.
Moreover, our learning modules needed to meet several requirements related to web interface, navigation, and structure: The images should be clear, simple, and attractive so as to not distract but rather stimulate inquiry for all-level students. The modules should provide interactivity that does not interfere with the learning. That is, they should include navigation options that do not make students swerve away from key points. At the highest level of exploration, the modules should provide a bridge to the Common Molecules collection, and the students should reach a webpage provided by the collection where informal and chemical knowledge is displayed and students can interactively visualize and investigate the molecule.
This layered, interactive environment combines the idea of learning by viewing (20, 21) with learning by doing (22, 23). Students have control over the exploration and the concrete outcome of their interaction with the learning environment, which may be information and a specific image of the viewed structure that can be taken away and utilized in a class project. Such control motivates the learner (24 - 26) and encourages creativity.
Self-guided exploration in a familiar environment. Our learning module, House and Garden, provides a fun exploration in the setting of a home (Fig. 1). Students are presented with a virtual house that has ten different options: Kitchen, Living Room, Bedroom, Children's Room, Bathroom, Study, Garage, Shed, Basement, and Lawn. Each option offers a room scene that displays common items that students recognize from their own homes. Mouse-over bubble pop-ups invite the student to enter a room and discover. Clearly visible go-back options and the ability to move from scene to scene are available. Once in a certain room or scene, students can explore items. Each scene was graphically designed to be palatable for various learners from secondary school pupils to the casual adult learner, with a clear and simple background that allows a student to remain focused on items to be investigated.
Figure 1. Layers of exploration in the House and Garden module.
Multiple options and scalability. In the module, no pre-fixed path is set for the exploration and multiple options are available. In each room, there are several obvious objects that have descriptions, but there are also items that await discovery. For example, the kitchen scene depicts dish soap, vinegar, salt, soda, each of which have a description one click away. Yet, students may also open a refrigerator and investigate its content; here descriptions are two clicks away. Mouse-over will indicate which items are available for exploration or are further described. Scientific information, trivia, history and a selected list of chemicals that are relevant to the portrayed items are included in the descriptions. The goal of these descriptions is to illustrate how the chemicals affect properties of the item, i.e., aroma, taste, toxicity, and how the chemicals may relate to phenomena that the students observe in their everyday life.
The list of compounds can be further explored and students are subsequently guided to the Common Molecules collection. Here, the compounds are explained in more detail and a choice can be made to inquire more, i.e. to view crystallographic details and use visualization tools to investigate the compound's geometric details. Depending on students' prior knowledge, some may find a list of the chemical content of an item just enough, others may want to learn about the molecular structures of the chemicals. The layering of our learning module from concrete objects of everyday life to abstract chemical structures allows students to pace and scale their learning individually according to their needs (Fig. 2). This built-in scalability will avoid cognitive overload and result in sustained attention of students with diverse interests and knowledge levels.
Figure 2. Scalability of educational content in the House and Garden module.
Quiz format. This learning module was developed as an activity for middle school students participating in the National Science Olympiad, held in Bloomington Indiana in 2006. Either-or questions are posed and the students are requested to choose between a correct and an incorrect answer. Applets allow for visual interrogation of the molecule while contemplating the response. Illustrations enhance the presentation without giving away the correct answer. A total of 28 questions deal with popular or curious topics such as the environment, poisons in nature, the stuff life is made of, and old wives' tales. Students can choose to answer question-by-question or go to a list to select what is most interesting to them. When the students elect their answer by mouse click, a new window opens to give feedback accompanied by an explanation of the chosen chemical. From here, one can click on the name of the chemical in the explanatory text to once again gain entry into the Common Molecules collection. Students have full control over how far they want to explore (Fig. 3). Also, with two layers built into the quiz and the additional layers inherent in the design of the Common Molecules collection, the quiz can be played by a broader group of learners than the initial specific target group. The quiz was a great success during the Science Olympiad and was given to single students on individual computers or student groups on big screen displays. We observed that after playing this quiz, students chose to explore on their own the Common Molecules collection. We are using the quiz now routinely for chemistry outreach activities beyond the middle school level.
Figure 3. Interrogation layers in the Do You Know Your Molecules? module.
There are of course endless possibilities to exploit the information compiled in the Common Molecules collection. Our development choices will be made based on educator and student feedback. Additional educational modules we envision are related to the research our laboratory is focused on, i.e., structural chemistry and crystallography. Projects currently under development are crystallization experiments for various levels, from the young scientist experimenting in Mother's kitchen with rock candy, to the nascent professional in the field, as well as a mineralogy module and an exploratory environment beyond a House and Garden setting that can be investigated for its chemicals. In conjunction with a newly established crystallography class at Indiana University, we are also planning to develop a game module that teaches students about safety issues in the environment of an X-ray laboratory. It will place students in a virtual lab where they can handle tasks in a playful manner and, more importantly, in a risk-free, virtual environment.
Furthermore, we will continue our work on the House and Garden module, adding descriptions for illustrated items, that is to say, we are still "moving in." In the near future, we will also develop assessment tools (e.g., quizzes, informal surveys) whereby students and teachers can measure the knowledge gained from the modules. Providing assessment tools is especially important in a self-guided, computer-mediated learning environment (25). It can help students to identify errors and check their misconceptions. We are projecting assessment to be a tool verifying students' knowledge and a way to expand students' learning experience with relevant cues. For instance, when students choose a wrong answer on a quiz, informational guidance will lead them to the correct answer rather than giving correct answers directly. We expect an assessment quiz will provide students with valuable feedback and time for reflection, both critical components in learning. Informal surveys will give us anecdotal evidence regarding the effectiveness and success of the learning modules.
This project was in part sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF-DUE 0121699). We thank Dr. J. C. Huffman, Dr. J. C. Bollinger, and all programmers and content developers who have contributed to the Reciprocal Net project.