Service-Learning in Chemistry: Lead in Soil from Vehicle Emissions

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Chemistry (12)The Chemistry Department is integrating an environmentally-based service-learning laboratory into the first-year chemistry course in order to motivate student learning, enhance connections throughout the curriculum, and promote science, mathematics, and engineering within the local community. Students in the first-year chemistry laboratory gain experience dealing with real-world samples, make and test hypotheses based upon statistical evaluation of data they have collected, generate case-study data for consideration in subsequent common core classes, work effectively in teams, explore connections between public policy and environmental chemistry in the wider community, and communicate their results to both technical and non-technical audiences through oral or written reports. Students in our first-year chemistry course plan, sample, and test for lead in soils from vehicle emissions throughout the community. In the process they will collaborate with students in a probability and statistics course, students at a local elementary school, and the California Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. The data collected in this project will be revisited by students a year later in a mathematics course in probability and statistics, allowing them to undertake more sophisticated analyses. The laboratory is modeled after the service-learning general chemistry projects at Loyola University of Chicago, the University of Utah, and Kalamazoo College which employ atomic absorption spectroscopy to test for lead in the local community.