A Flexible Networked Laboratory Simulation for Use in Introductory Chemistry Courses

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As the material covered in introductory chemistry courses is abstract, teachers find it difficult to convey an intuitive understanding to their students, and without an intuitive understanding, retention is bound to suffer. Part of this difficulty stems from the tools currently available to faculty. The paper-and-pencil activities used in lecture courses are simply not well suited to convey an intuitive feel for chemical phenomena. In laboratory courses, practical constraints make it difficult to go beyond scripted laboratory procedures and toward inquiry-based learning.The chemical laboratory simulation proposed here allows faculty to: (i) create lecture demonstrations that enable a concrete discussion of the qualitative nature of the material before and while discussing the underlying mathematics (ii) create assignments that involve chemical, in addition to paper-and-pencil, manipulations and (iii) design exercises that prepare students for actual laboratory experiments, and that allow students to design their own procedures which they will then implement in the laboratory. The software is designed to be easily incorporated into existing course structures. Since it uses the Java network computing language, it need only be installed on a Web server. Use of a network database allows faculty to create automatically graded assignments and monitor student performance in real time. The software allows users to select from hundreds of standard reagents and combine them in any way they see fit. Due to this flexibility, we will not only present faculty with completed materials, but also empower them to create effective curricula that are tailored to their local needs and environment.In addition to formative assessment, summative assessment of the effects on student retention will be based on individual student data collected and stored in the network database, performance on course exams, and retention exams given 3 and 15 months after the end of the course. For the past two years, retention data has been collected to act as a baseline for this study.