The ACELL project: Student participation, professional development, and improving laboratory learning

The Australian Physical Chemistry Enhanced Laboratory Learning (APCELL) project (Barrie, Buntine, Jamie and Kable 2001a, 2001b, 2001c), and its all-of-chemistry successor, ACELL (Read, 2006a) are examples of contemporary efforts to meet the challenge of engaging students in laboratory activities which are both chemically and educationally sound. The project is collaborative; it overcomes many of the significant constraints imposed by the unavailability of time from individual teachers, by drawing on the resources and expertise of multiple institutions as well as chemical and pedagogical expertise. The project continues to produce a range of tangible outcomes, including chemistry education research publications, a database of freely available tested experiments, and pedagogical design tools (all available from http://acell.chem.usyd.edu.au/). Objective evidence is required to support the putative notion that the A(P)CELL concept is of benefit to educators as they design and evaluate laboratory programs; collection and evaluation of such empirical data is essential if views such as those of Hawkes (2004) are to be effectively challenged. In this paper we report on the views of staff and student delegates to the February 2006 ACELL Educational Workshop

Cơ sở hoá học

392 tr. ; 21 c

Lessons from a pandemic : educating for complexity, change, uncertainty, vulnerability, and resilience

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed many aspects of our world including the way we teach chemistry. Our emergence from the pandemic provides an opportunity for deep reflection and intentional action about what we teach, and why, as well as how we facilitate student learning. Focusing on foundational postsecondary chemistry courses, we suggest that we cannot simply return to "normal” practice but need to design and implement new ways of teaching and learning based on fundamentally reimagined learning outcomes for our courses that equip students for life after the rupture they have experienced. We recommend that new learning objectives should be guided both by an analysis of existing global challenges and the types of understandings and practices needed to confront them, and by research-based frameworks that provide insights into important areas of knowledge, skill, and attitude development. We identify a core set of competencies along three major dimensions (crosscutting reasoning, core understandings, and fundamental practices) that we believe should guide the design, implementation, and evaluation of chemistry curricula, teaching practices, and assessments in foundational courses for science and engineering majors. The proposed framework adopts systems thinking as the underpinning form of reasoning that students should develop to analyze and comprehend complex global systems and phenomena

The ACELL project : student participation, professional development, and improving laboratory learning

Chemistry is an ‘enabling science’ as its core concepts are essential for almost every area of science (White, O’Connor, Mousley, Cole and MacGillivray 2003) and it is studied both as a discipline in its own right and as a central component of other degree programs. Across 35 Australian universities, more than 20 000 students are taught chemistry each year (Barrie, Buntine, Jamie and Kable 2001a). Chemistry is also a highly conceptual discipline, requiring an ability to deal with phenomena at both a macroscopic and microscopic level, and to connect with symbolic representations used at each of these levels. Students may experience difficulties with their learning if this symbolic language is taken for granted, and there is a risk that connections between the material world and theoretical constructs may be misunderstood (Marais and Jordaan 2000; Kozma, Chin, Russell and Marx 2000; Bucat 2004). The laboratory environment is a bridge between theory and praxis, it offers unique opportunities to assist students as they attempt to construct an understanding of these connections.7 page(s

From APCELL to ACELL and beyond - expanding a multi-institution project for laboratory-based teaching and learning

The Advancing Chemistry by Enhancing Learning in the Laboratory (ACELL) project is a well-established, multi-institution, collaborative project contributing to improvements in the quality of laboratory-based teaching and learning. ACELL is an expansion of the previous APCELL project and now encompasses all areas of undergraduate chemistry. It contributes to quality improvement in laboratory learning directly by providing a database of educationally sound, peer-reviewed, and student- tested undergraduate laboratory experiments. Testing of experiments is generally carried out at dedicated workshops, such as the one held in Sydney in February 2006, at which 33 experiments from 27 different universities from Australia and New Zealand were evaluated. In addition, by contributing to the professional development of chemistry academic staff by expanding their understanding of issues surrounding student learning, by fostering the development of a community of pedagogically aware educators, and by providing tools for analysing and documenting teaching experiments, the ACELL project has the potential to catalyse the improvement of experiments not directly reviewed by the project. This paper reviews the evolution of ACELL, its current position, and provides some suggestions for future developments.7 page(s

From APCELL to ACELL and beyond : expanding a multi-institution project for laboratory-based teaching and learning

The Advancing Chemistry by Enhancing Learning in the Laboratory (ACELL) project is a well-established, multi-institution, collaborative project contributing to improvements in the quality of laboratory-based teaching and learning. ACELL is an expansion of the previous APCELL project and now encompasses all areas of undergraduate chemistry. It contributes to quality improvement in laboratory learning directly by providing a database of educationally sound, peer-reviewed, and student-tested undergraduate laboratory experiments. Testing of experiments is generally carried out at dedicated workshops, such as the one held in Sydney in February 2006, at which 33 experiments from 27 different universities from Australia and New Zealand were evaluated. In addition, by contributing to the professional development of chemistry academic staff by expanding their understanding of issues surrounding student learning, by fostering the development of a community of pedagogically aware educators, and by providing tools for analysing and documenting teaching experiments, the ACELL project has the potential to catalyse the improvement of experiments not directly reviewed by the project. This paper reviews the evolution of ACELL, its current position, and provides some suggestions for future developments

Advancing Chemistry by Enhancing Learning in the Laboratory (ACELL) : a model for providing professional and personal development and facilitating improved student laboratory learning outcomes

The Advancing Chemistry by Enhancing Learning in the Laboratory (ACELL) project aims to improve the quality of learning in undergraduate laboratories through two interlocking mechanisms. The first is to build a database of experiments that are both chemically and educationally sound by testing them in a third-party laboratory, usually through an ACELL workshop involving both academic staff and students, to ensure that they work. The second mechanism provides personal and professional development for staff and students through a workshop process, and reinforced through on-going engagement with the ACELL community via the project website and experiment assessment and evaluation. The ACELL workshops include discussion of educational issues, both in abstract (through discussing laboratory learning in general) and concrete (through debriefing of each experiment tested) terms. This paper discusses the design of the ACELL project, and illustrates some of the successes of the staff and student personal and professional development aims

What makes a good laboratory learning exercise? Student feedback from the ACELL project

Over the last 7 years, a group of Australian universities have been collaboratively running a chemistry education project, now called ACELL (Advancing Chemistry by Enhanced Learning in the Laboratory). One of the key aims of ACELL is to facilitate the development and evaluation of educationally sound chemistry laboratory exercises with the goal of improving the quality of students’ learning in the laboratory in Australia, New Zealand, and throughout the world. As part of this project, ACELL has developed an instrument for investigating students’ perceptions of their laboratory learning experiences. To date, ACELL had collected data on 19 experiments from 972 students across 7 universities in Australia and New Zealand using this instrument, and this data collection is ongoing. As a consequence, ACELL is in an unusually good position to identify and discuss both procedural and cognitive factors that influence students’ evaluation of their laboratory learning experiences, such as assessment, the quality of notes, interest, and the inclusion of opportunities for independent learning. Our results are both surprising and encouraging, and indicate that students can be highly cognitively engaged, even with traditionally “boring” content, provided a suitable learning environment is established. This paper will describe the research approach undertaken, discuss the range of factors which appear to significantly influence students’ learning experiences, and consider the implications for the design of educationally sound chemistry laboratory exercises.14 page(s