Learning materials development

{ACS General Chemistry Textbook Project} - development of an ACS-sponsored text published by Freeman in 2001. (This site disappeared in 2005; link is to an archive.) See the current Freeman student user site.

ChemWiki: The Dynamic Chemistry Textbook - "The ChemWiki project is a collaborative approach toward chemistry education where an Open Access textbook environment is constantly being written and re-written partly by students and partly by faculty members resulting in a free Chemistry textbook to supplement conventional paper-based books." See here for the General Chemistry section.

 

General Chemistry Curriculum Development and resources

ChemCOM Resource Center ChemCom® is a chemistry curriculum written for secondary school students by the American Chemical Society (ACS). It attempt to enhance science literacy by emphasizing chemistry's impact on society. Each of the eight units revolves around a societal question which creates a need to know chemistry to find a solution. The context of each question is a community: local, workplace, national,or global. chemistry presented to the students builds upon the same vocabulary, thinking skills, problem solving and lab techniques as most traditional introductory chemistry courses.

ChemgaPedia is a "curricular encyclopedia" for Chemistry — a set of learning units being developed by Fiz Chemie Berlin. The German-language materials are gradually being translated into English; as of early 2013, about 100 of these (mostly in organic chemistry) were available.

(Chemistry Courseware Consortium} ("C-CUBED") This project has been developing software for use in chemistry teaching as part of the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP)in the UK. This site features news of consortium activities; on-line feedback, information request and order forms; a product catalogue with full module descriptions and example screenshots; a frequently asked question (FAQ) file with the latest information on technical and implementation issues; tips on how to get the best out of the software; aeneral information about the project and the services that it offers. (This site disappeared in early 2007; link is to an archive)

ChemPrime attempts to illustrate the practical applications of chemical principles. It is set up as a Wiki, to which anyone can contribute. The index is very well organized, but suffers from too many entries (Gay-Lussac's law in Foods?) that lead nowhere. See also this ACS Symposium book chapter abstract by Ed Vitz entitled Developing ChemPRIME: Transforming the Didactics and Pedagogy of the General Chemistry Course with a Wiki Text.

CLUE: Chemistry, Life, the Universe, and Everything - An integrated curriculum developed at U. Colorado, claiming robust learning outcomes and available to teachers elsewhere. These materials focus on the "big ideas" that underlie chemistry, such as models and theories, molecular vs macroscopic, energetics, reactivitym equilibrium and thermodynamics.

C-Mor (Chemistry Modules of Richmond) This group at the University of Richmond (VA) is developing CD-based materials relating to lecture and laboratory work at the first-year college level.

Miami University Center for Chemical Education - This long-time project at Miami U. of Ohio does research in science eduction, teacher professional development courses, and free downloadable science activities.

National Computational Science Education Consortium offers a number of nicely-done instructional modules on chemistry-related topics, mostly aimed at the elementary-middle school level.

Peer-led Team Learning (PLTL) "is a nationally recognized model of teaching and learning that originated in a chemistry course at the City College of New York in 1991. In PLTL, students who have done well are recruited to be peer-leaders: students who facilitate small-group learning as an integral part of the course..."

Physical Chemistry with a Purpose - The goal of this NSF funded project is to produce a trial set of materials that can be used in physical chemistry courses to more tightly connect the topics introduced in available texts to the realm of modern chemical research..

Perspectives of Chemists: Tracking conceptual understanding of student
learning in chemistry at the secondary and university levels - Describes a chemistry curriculum and assessment
project that has framed the “big ideas” of chemistry in order to provide developmental cohesion
and promote conceptual understanding for students. (Stacey Group, UC-Berkeley, 2003)

Science in the Classroom - This NSF-supported project is developig a collection of annotated research papers from Science magazine and accompanying teaching materials designed to help students understand the structure and workings of professional scientific research. (As of January 2013, one Chemistry-related article is available.)

Peer-led Team Learning (PLTL) "is a nationally recognized model of teaching and learning that originated in a chemistry course at the City College of New York in 1991. In PLTL, students who have done well are recruited to be peer-leaders: students who facilitate small-group learning as an integral part of the course..."

Scottish Chemistry Online Teaching Service - this site contains a large collection of materials, including demonstrations, that are being assembled to aid the teaching of Chemistry in Scottish schools.

Starburstt Consortium links primarily-undergraduate universities for sharing technology relating to instrumentation (crystallography, NMR, MS), nanotechnology and medicinal chemistry.

SourceBook was a project aimed at bringing a wide variety of chemistry teacher resources together for the teacher's desktop. The materials were published in print form (four volumes) and on the ChemSource CD ROM that was first released in 1994. The collection is most notable for the large number of laboratory and other activities in a variety of topics.

{UC Berkeley Digital Chem 1A Lab Manual} profides an interesting example of integrating technology into a large-enrollment course. It "seeks to make the extensive online course materials used to teach General Chemistry at UC Berkeley freely available to the large online community." (Withdrawn: link is to April 2007 archive.)

Web Science Project seeks to adapt the Just-in-Time Teaching method (JiTT) to science and mathematics courses. The underlying method is to use feedback between the Web and the classroom to increase interactivity and allow rapid response to students' problems. The site has links to several IUPUI courses, including one in Chemistry.

 

Molecules, Materials, and Nanoscale

The Concord Consortium is a nonprofit educational R&D organization that produces high-quality educational software that is offered free of charge. Most of it is open-sourced so you can adapt it to your own needs or use it as the basis for your own software development efforts. Of special interest to Chemistry are their Molecular Literacy Project, Molecular Rover Project, and Science of Atoms and Molecules Project— all of which are described elsewhere on this page.

Experimania ("from molecules to materials") is a European consortium dedicated to revitalize the teaching of science.

INVSEE (Interactive Nano-Visualization in Science and Engineering Education) IN-VSEE is a consortium engaged in creating an interactive site to develop a new educational thrust based on remote operation of advanced microscopes and nano-fabrication tools coupled to powerful surface characterization  methods. As of 2000, there were about 17 modules covering such topics as iridescence, sphere packing, biological and engineered materials, and "Why does a light bulb burn out" which allows one to design a remote experiment to test alternative filament materials. This project appears to be dead (2014), and no useful archive pages are available. Can anyone provide information or links to some of the developed materials?

MathMol MathMol is being developed at theNYU/ACF Scientific Visualization Center in association with the NYU Collaborative for Excellence in Teacher Preparation, District 2 in Manhattan and the YMCA Beacon Technology Center . The purpose of MathMol is to provide the K-12 educational community with information and materials dealing with the rapidly growing fields of molecular modeling and 3-D visualization. As the program gains momentum, databases and activities will be posted for educational use. Many activities will permit students to work interactively with molecular and mathematical images.

The Molecular Literacy Project - final report of this three-year project (a Concord MA consortium) intended to enhance science and technology teaching in grades 10-14 by providing Molecular Literacy content in support of careers in biotechnology and nanotechnology. Links to sites associated with these projects are provided at the end of the report. A few typical units cover polymerization, chromatography, DNA-to-protein synthesis, and van der Waals interactions. Two components of this project, Molecular Logic and Molecular Workbench, offer free open-source software.

Molecular Logic Project - The goal of this project is to improve the ability of all students to understand fundamental biological phenomena in terms of the interactions of atoms and molecules. The Molecular Logic project aims to do this by enhancing biology courses with guided explorations of powerful atomic and molecular computational models. These models are embedded in an easily implemented database linked to both typical textbooks and standards. Over one hundred models of chemical and biological phenomena are available.

Molecular Rover Project develops interactive environments of atomic-scale systems that allow the student to explore forces, structures, and motions from a microscopic viewpoint. "If we could mount a video camera on an atom like what NASA did on a Mars rover, what would we see? This is the mission of the Molecular Rover... With the central idea that the user can participate in a simulation by playing the role of an atom or a chemical group, a lot of new things can be borrowed from the gaming industry".

The Molecular Science Project is an NSF systemic-reform initiative. It has developed server-based instructional materials for lower-division chemistry courses, including Web-based cooperative reading/writing Calibrated Peer Review projects.

NanoSense The NanoSense project (2004-2008) addressed the question of how to teach nanoscale science at the high school level. Working closely with scientists and educators, the project created, tested, and disseminated 4 curriculum units to help high school teachers and students understand nanoscale science.

Nanotechnology - Exploring the Nanoworld contains a wealth of information and links to all aspects of this growing field, with special resources for students and teachers at both the K-12 and college levels. A NSF-funded project of at U. Wisconsin - Madison.

Science of Atoms and Molecules (SAM) - "The Science of Atoms and Molecules project offers 24 research-based, field-tested activities for physics, chemistry, and biology. We provide these all freely to teachers and students online. Through the SAM activities' interactive models and simulations, we involve students in active learning."

 

Instructional Methodology and organization

Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) is a program for networked computers, that enables frequent writing assignments without any increase in instructor work. This NSF-sponsored project was developed at UCLA, and the materials and technology are used in their General Chemistry course, and in those of several other consortium schools.

The ChemCollective - a collection of virtual labs, scenario-based learning activities, and concepts tests which can be incorporated into a variety of teaching approaches as pre-labs, alternatives to textbook homework, and in-class activities for individuals or teams. Submissions from others are invited.

ChemSense - This project developed tools for investigating, visualizing and discussing chemistry in the classroom. It "studied students' understanding of chemistry and developed software and curriculum to help students investigate chemical systems and express ideas in animated chemical notation." Software developed in this project is still available for download.

Consortium for Technology in Teaching Chemistry (CTTC) is run by USC for Southern California teachers and institutions who are interested in implementing computer technologies in their high school science classrooms, in order to pool resources, share ideas, develop strategies, and provide continuing education.

Digital Chem1a Study: Costs, Culture, and Complexity: An Analysis of Technology Enhancements in a Large Lecture Course at UC Berkeley.

Eisenhower National Clearinghouse for Mathematics and Science The ENC provides through its home page a database of descriptions of more than 6,000 educational products (mostly K-12), including those supported by NSF, an on-line collection of educational documents and ENC publications, a database of lessons and activities for teaching science and mathematics, access to resource people to answer questions about science and mathematics education, the Digital Dozen (links to educational WWW sites), and information on grant programs for educational projects.

{Graduate Postcertificaiton Teacher Training in Chemistry} - this NSF-supported project directed by Prof. David Brooks of the University of Nebraska - Lincoln offers Web-based minicourses in a number of Chemistry subjects. (Link is to the last archived version, Dec 2006.)

IrYdium Project - Carnegie-Mellon University. "The IrYdium Project is working to combine Network Computing and Remote Database Technology into educational tools that can be easily integrated into introductory chemistry courses nationwide. " This project has been supplanted by the ChemCollective listed above, but the site still contains some useful links.

Learning Online Network with CAPA - This NSF-sponsored project builds on the CAPA on-line assessment system developed at Michigan State University, and which has been used by numerous Chemistry departments. The intention is to extend this system (along with MSU's "Lecture Online" facility) into a dynamic online collaborative community of teachers and publishers.

Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Electronic Resource (VIPEr) "A Cyber-Enabled Community of Practice for Improving Inorganic Chemical Education that facilitates collaborative development of learning materials and their dissemination to the wider inorganic community. ." Collections include web resources, text materials, and in-class activities on topics such as main group chemistry, f-block chemistry, coordination chemistry, organometallic chemistry, solid state and materials chemistry.