Science Literacy and Undergraduate Success: Incorporating Scale as a Theme in Introductory Chemistry

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This project is focusing on scale literacy, one of four common themes previously identified by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for scientific literacy. The primary objective is increasing the scale literacy of general chemistry students and is establishing the correlation of their success in chemistry with their level of scale literacy. To achieve the objective the project is correlating scale literacy with conceptual understanding of specific chemistry content, is creating and deploying integrated scale-themed instruction in a variety of contexts (lecture, laboratory, supplemental instruction), and is determining how incorporation of concepts of scale in foundation courses leads to success in other courses. The intellectual merit of this project is the determination of the correlation between increases in scale literacy with conceptual understanding, both in the short and long terms, when explicitly included in the general chemistry curriculum. Based on preliminary findings that scale literacy is a better predictor for success in an introductory chemistry course, this project is also establishing how integrating scale-themed instruction leads to improved performance both overall, and within specific content areas. The broader impacts of this project include a general increase in students' scientific literacy even within large enrollment introductory chemistry courses. More directly, the project is distributing novel, scale-themed instructional materials for General Chemistry as well as faculty professional development activities to allow students across institutions to benefit. Further, since scale is not unique to chemistry, students in other college science courses are benefiting as the outcomes of this research are adopted and implemented across disciplines.