Discipline‐centered post‐secondary science education research: Distinctive targets, challenges and opportunities

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108082/1/tea21165.pd

The Role of Written and Verbal Expression in Improving Communication Skills for Students in an Undergraduate Chemistry Program

Proofreading, editing, and critique, the customary assessment tools scientists use to evaluate professional journal articles, grant applications, and any other writing, can be applied equally well in introductory science instruction. Such feedback is, in fact, crucial to growth and development. When learning anything new, students and faculty alike rely heavily on sources other than themselves (‘external editors’) to assess their understanding as they develop self-assessment skills (or ‘internal editors’). Although they rarely describe it in these terms, faculty nonetheless assume that students have developed and refined their internal skills by the time they take examinations and write term papers. Unfortunately, science instructors traditionally provide little meaningful assistance or rationale for students to get to that point. This is in part because we faculty have already developed and deploy our professional skills so tacitly. To a degree, individuals who become faculty members probably follow paths of least resistance, the ones along which they were successful by virtue of their ‘natural aptitude’. What some instructors intend to be their best advice to students can be wholly inadequate if it only reflects on the surface aspects of what they did as students: “do lots of problems,” “write lots of prose,” “sit alone and wrestle with the ideas.” One of the things we faculty do quite naturally in our professional lives is to rely on external input. Having developed any idea to whatever limit we are able to achieve sitting alone in our workplaces with our internal editors and our reference sources, we next try out the ideas on our colleagues. Expressing our understanding to others is always a teaching activity since we are revealing our interpretation of some aspect of the world to another individual, testing the interpretation against another’s point-of-view. Faculty share a common experience that they describe in familiar terms: “I never really learned it until I had to teach it.” Perhaps what we also mean is that we actually think about our ideas in new ways when we are consciously aware of the fact that we need to describe them to someone else. In writing as well as speaking, attention to the needs of the audience is critical to clarity in the expression of meaning through the use of information (1). Learners learn differently, perhaps even more effectively, when they anticipate the need to express their understanding to someone else. For students, the most common example of this type of anticipation is in preparation for a written or oral examination. This perspective is not at all limited to expository writing and speaking, the usual modes of expression in the physical sciences; revealing internal perspectives represents +expression+ regardless of its modality, and does not favor writers and orators over thespians, pianists, painters, ballerinas or chanteurs

Full Human Presence: A Guidepost to Mentoring Undergraduate Science Students

Mentoring represents a new mode of professional development for the sciences. Mentoring in the sciences can also assure that the next generation of scholars will help break the cycle of perpetuating a narrow, and increasingly untenable, definition of education. Various examples of mentoring are presented.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/34810/1/7_ftp.pd

Editorial: Day 2-to-40. Proceedings from a Chemical Education Workshop Symposium

This issue of The Chemical Educator is devoted to the Proceedings from a workshop symposium that I organized for the weekend of May 10–11, 1997. The two-day event was held in the Willard H. Dow Chemical Sciences laboratory building on the central campus of The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45960/1/897_1998_Article_4.pd

The Hexagon of Alpha Chi Sigma

Quarterly publication of the Alpha Chi Sigma chemistry fraternity containing articles related to chemistry research and the activities of the organization, including local chapters and groups

Design and Implementation of a Studio-Based General Chemistry Course

Most students taking general chemistry courses do not intend to pursue careers in chemistry; in fact, they are more likely to end up in positions where they fund, write, or vote for chemical research and policies. Our profession continues to ask how we can teach students scientific reasoning skills and chemical understanding in general chemistry that they are able to take beyond the classroom into their everyday lives. The emerging answer at this university is the studio teaching method, which incorporates the “best teaching and learning practices†recommended by chemical education research within an integrated lecture–lab technology-intensive environment. The design, implementation, and pedagogical rationale of studio general chemistry are described

Substituent effects on 13C NMR chemical shifts in dialkylaminophenylchlorophosphines

The relative chemical shifts and 2J(PC) coupling constants in the low-temperature limiting spectra of a series of Ph(R2N)PCl compounds [R = Me, Et, PhCH2, iPr and c-Hex] differ for R = primary or secondary. For primary alkyl substituents, the more downfield signal exhibits a large, positive coupling and the more upfield resonance shows a small, negative coupling. These observations are reversed for secondary alkyl substituents. Calculated minimum-energy molecular structures indicate that the source of this reversal does not lie in differences in conformation about the P---N bond. Analysis of the high- and low-temperature limiting spectra of a series of Ph(RR'N)PCl compounds [R, R' = Me, Et, Bz, iPr and c-Hex] suggests that the N---C carbon syn to the phosphorus lone-pair is subject to a relatively constant deshielding effect from the phosphorus-lone pair and a shielding contribution from the anti substituent that increases with increasing bulk of that anti substituent. Conversely, the chemical shift of the carbon anti to the phosphorus lone-pair is relatively insensitive to changes in the syn substituent, giving rise to the observed chemical shift reversal.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/30376/1/0000778.pd

Intermolecular 1,3-dipolar cycloadditions of muchnones with acetylenic dipolarophiles: Sorting out the regioselectivity

A series of 1,3-dipolar cycloadditions of munchnones with acetylenic dipolarophiles was studied, wherein factors related to regioselectivity were investigated. The results from munchnones with electronically divergent thioaryl substituents compared with others bearing alkyl substituents suggest that an unsymmetrical transition state structure, rather than FMO perturbation, plays a significant role in regioselection. If eclipsing interactions preclude a highly unsymmetrical transition state however, then minimizing steric interactions becomes important. A pair of complementarily substituted munchnones, differing only in the position of isotopic labels, establishes an inherently symmetrical electronic nature of the mesoionic heterocycle.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/31644/1/0000578.pd

Genomic Relationships, Novel Loci, and Pleiotropic Mechanisms across Eight Psychiatric Disorders

Genetic influences on psychiatric disorders transcend diagnostic boundaries, suggesting substantial pleiotropy of contributing loci. However, the nature and mechanisms of these pleiotropic effects remain unclear. We performed analyses of 232,964 cases and 494,162 controls from genome-wide studies of anorexia nervosa, attention-deficit/hyper-activity disorder, autism spectrum disorder, bipolar disorder, major depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, and Tourette syndrome. Genetic correlation analyses revealed a meaningful structure within the eight disorders, identifying three groups of inter-related disorders. Meta-analysis across these eight disorders detected 109 loci associated with at least two psychiatric disorders, including 23 loci with pleiotropic effects on four or more disorders and 11 loci with antagonistic effects on multiple disorders. The pleiotropic loci are located within genes that show heightened expression in the brain throughout the lifespan, beginning prenatally in the second trimester, and play prominent roles in neurodevelopmental processes. These findings have important implications for psychiatric nosology, drug development, and risk prediction.Peer reviewe