The Effectiveness of Group Activities in Tutorials for Chemistry 209

New small-group tutorial activities in a large-enrollment chemistry course are designed to encourage interactions and conversations among students and with their instructors. These activities are examined based on the course learning objectives and Bloom’s Taxonomy. Effects on student learning and attitudes are investigated through academic performance and feedback from surveys.N

Enhancing Course Development Through Conversations

Using student coursework and feedback from an introductory chemistry course for engineering students, we were able to develop new materials designed to focus on improving the issues that students self-identify as problematic. In this way, our dialogue continues between instructors and students over multiple semesters.N

Enhancing course development through conversations

As many undergraduates in the Faculty of Science know, the unit on buffer systems in first year chemistry is one of the toughest parts of the course. However, despite this difficulty being commonly seen, there is still a large gap in the literature on the teaching and learning of buffer systems^1. Due to the gap in literature about teaching buffer systems, this undergraduate research project built upon the work of Orgiland Sutherland^2 and looked to determine if there really is a statistical backing to the claims of difficulty with buffer systems, determine why such a difficulty exists, and attempt to address the observed issues through the implementation of a learning simulation