A Professor Visits

Recently I was lucky enough to attend a Tertiary Chemistry Teaching Symposium held here at Victoria University.  It was a gathering of chemistry lecturers from different universities around New Zealand and had a particular emphasis on teaching and learning in First Year chemistry courses.  The lecturers shared ideas and discussed common challenges that they were facing.  One of those challenges is that different schools cover different NCEA Level 3 chemistry achievement standards and therefore students in a First Year chemistry course can have a range of backgrounds in chemistry.  This, of course, makes it challenging to design First Year chemistry courses.  The lecturers were particularly concerned that not all students were doing the three external NCEA Level 3 chemistry standards.

Guest speaker at the symposium was Professor Roy Tasker from the University of Western Sydney where he is Professor of Chemical Education. Professor Tasker's presentation was on Visualisation of the Molecular World for a Deep Understanding of Chemistry. His key message was that to understand the chemistry that we observe (for example, a precipitate forming) we need to be able visualise what is happening at a molecular level, rather than jumping straight to writing a chemical equation.

 Professor Tasker's team are responsible for producing the VisChem videos that we sometimes watch in class.  These videos, showing animations of chemical reactions at the molecular level are now available to anybody through Scootle - tinyurl.com/VisChemOnScootle

A YouTube video on VisChem Learning Design, which demonstrates best practice in using molecular animations in the classroom can be found at: tinyurl.com/k2x34sr This approach involves students observing a chemical reaction, recording their observations and then producing a storyboard to show what they think is happening at the molecular level. They then discuss their storyboard with a peer before being shown the VisChem animation.  After viewing the animation students then reflect on any similarities and discrepancies between their representations and the animation. Finally what is happening at a molecular level is linked to how that can be represented by a chemical equation. This approach is a constructivist one which takes into account a student's current model of what is happening. It involves cognitive conflict as a student's previously held perceptions may be challenged by what is in the animation.   

If you are interested in seeing some amazing animations of molecules at work in living things, you might like to have a look at a video of a presentation by Drew Berry called Animations of Unseeable Biology - tinyurl.com/7tkh9zw