The ChemPRIME initiative will create an educational resource: a learning resource for students and a teaching resource for faculty members containing tools for evaluation and assessment of the entire chemistry curriculum. ChemPRIME will serve as an organizing matrix for educational materials. Within the resource concepts will be presented through integrated real-world examples, and students' desire to learn will be stimulated by a topical approach to the exploration of fundamental principles. By this method we expect to increase student interest, improve student performance, and enable faculty members to creatively link chemistry to other disciplines within the undergraduate environment.
The cornerstones of the ChemPRIME approach are choice and flexibility. Students may choose their path through the material by selecting a track composed of examples where chemistry is an integral part of something that touches their lives. Students may work through a single track or move from track to track as their interest in the subject matter of the exemplars dictates. Faculty members may choose specific tracks or exemplars to customize courses and to create new courses.
All tracks in the introductory course are presented at two levels of difficulty: an overview, suitable for non- science majors, and an in-depth treatment for science and engineering students. In the advanced courses, the overview serves as an outline to the material with hyperlinks to concepts the students may wish to review before advancing.
The manner of presentation of each exemplar is also an option: inductive or deductive presentations or settings using cooperative learning formats may be selected by instructors or students.
Laboratory experiments embedded in the text may be selected by the faculty member for completion by the student as "hands-on" experiments or as simulations consisting of interactive animations and video. The experiments and demonstrations are presented in a fashion to underscore the relationship between theory and experiment.
Self-tests are built into the tracks for the students. Nested within the entire system is the ability for faculty members to monitor how the resource is used by students and to test its effectiveness.
To present a curriculum with multiple options, the resource is built as a computer based network of hyperlinked information and multimedia presentations. Both CD-ROM and a World-Wide Web compatible local server system will be evaluated as means of delivery to handle the volume of material, the visual presentations and the hyperlinks.
The ChemPRIME project is about innovation. Specific activities and efforts are incorporated into the ChemPRIME project to increase the likelihood of rapid and effective dissemination of results and adoption and use of this resource.
1. RESULTS FROM PRIOR NSF SUPPORT
Project ChemPRIME received a planning grant from NSF in January 1995 and has used that funding to assemble regularly a working group of colleagues from nine regional schools, to secure the active participation of experts on instructional design and evaluation, and to assemble an industrial advisory board to assist in developing a strategy to secure industrial involvement in creating the resource. We have developed a detailed plan of action for implementing and evaluating the effectiveness of the global changes we propose in the undergraduate chemistry curriculum. We have begun the construction of the database for an introductory course using the integrated multiple exemplar approach and have extended the exemplar concept into upper level courses, thereby demonstrating its utility at all levels (Appendix A).
In addition to the plan, a functional prototype of the educational resource to be developed in this project has been prepared on the topic of kinetics. The student interface has been designed, interactive graphics and video clips have been produced, and text has been written in a hypermedia environment to create a working model of the educational resource. The prototype (selected screens of which appear in Appendix B) illustrates our concept of teaching chemistry through integrated multiple exemplars drawn from real-world examples in an effort to increase student interest, improve student performance, and link chemistry to other disciplines within the undergraduate setting. An 18-minute video of a user navigating through the kinetics section has been prepared to share with colleagues from academe and industry whom we seek to recruit as participating authors. A World-Wide Web (WWW) site has been created for ChemPRIME and a paper has been presented at the National ACS Meeting in Anaheim in April, Vitz, E. and Schray, K. J., "The ChemPRIME Initiative," Abs. CHED 421, 209th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, Anaheim, CA, April 2-6, 1995. as a result of which a growing group of potential contributors has been identified (Appendix C).
2. PROBLEMS OR QUESTIONS ADDRESSED BY THIS PROJECT
Scientists, engineers, educators and employers continue to express concern about the chemistry curriculum and its impact on science students as well as on the large numbers of non-science majors in lower-division courses. This proposal addresses the need for systemic revision at all levels in the chemistry curriculum. Peter Likins, President of Lehigh University, recently wrote "60 Minutes asks "Are Professors teaching?" - - but it's the wrong Question," in 'From The President's Desk,' Lehigh Alumni Bulletin, p. 3, Spring 1995. Copy included in Appendix D.:
"Given our rapidly developing information society, the real question is 'how can we increase the productivity of learning, not teaching,' so we can provide quality learning at a reasonable price. One glib answer is to teach more, as 60 Minutes suggests. The problem with this answer is that it may not improve the quality of learning, especially if all we do is put our top professors in front of 1,000 freshmen in an auditorium. But much more importantly, students today don't respond as well to classroom teaching as they do to a world they know far better -- the world of multimedia."
The educational resource produced in Project ChemPRIME provides an opportunity for us all to respond to the calls for systemic revision of the entire undergraduate curriculum. By using the world of multimedia to which the students respond very positively, ChemPRIME incorporates the advantages of the topics driven approach to teaching with the principles driven approach.
Currently the chemistry teaching community is divided in its adherence to the topics driven and principles driven approaches. ChemPRIME will bridge that division. The topics driven approach presents one topic assumed to be of interest to the students, then supplies theory on a "need-to-know" basis. Although students may be find the topic interesting, this approach sacrifices a strong point of the traditional curriculum; namely, the presentation of prerequisites before a new principle is taught. ChemPRIME maintains the logical development of principles but also provides a menu of topical applications in the form of multiple exemplars through which the fundamentals are taught. The apparent irrelevance and lack of motivational features of the principle driven approach are averted, and the logical exposition of principles accepted by generations of teachers is maintained.
3. GOALS AND SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES
The overarching goal of the ChemPRIME initiative is the creation of an educational resource -- a learning resource for students and a teaching resource for faculty members with a built-in capability for the evaluation and assessment of its effectiveness as a learning and teaching tool.
The specific aims of the project are:
i) to create a complete undergraduate curriculum in which students will study the fundamentals of chemistry in the context of high-interest, real-world topics;
ii) to enable students to select their own path through the curriculum by choosing among a series of parallel exemplars, selected and designed to teach the same principles;
iii) to empower faculty members with the ability to customize courses and to create totally new courses at a level appropriate for either the general citizen or the scientist;
iv) to provide faculty members and students with a choice of presentation that reflects the learning style of the students;
v) to weave laboratory experiences into the fabric of the curriculum that may be done either as "hands-on" experiments in the laboratory or as simulations.
To accomplish these goals, the following specific tasks will be completed:
i) the organization of topics within a course along parallel tracks, each of which conveys the same chemical fundamentals to the students, requires the same input knowledge, and expects the same exit knowledge from the students;
ii) the construction of a multimedia, computer-based learning and teaching resource based on this topical approach to present information in a fashion that capitalizes on and stimulates student interests;
iii) the structuring of the network of hyperlinked information and multimedia within the resource to create a flexible curriculum enabling a wide range of options for students and instructors;
iv) the construction of the network to enable entry at levels having different expectations of student performance so that the resource may be effectively used by chemistry majors, science and engineering majors, and non-science students;
v) the tailoring of the database for use in science, engineering and chemical technology curricula as well as in interdisciplinary courses in business, journalism, education and other majors;
vi) the active solicitation of educators and industrial chemists nationwide to participate as authors and information sources for the development of exemplars;
vii) the completion of courses in introductory, analytical, organic and physical chemistry and the initial development of courses in inorganic and biochemistry, all using hypertext documents, multimedia, interactive lessons and integrated laboratories;
viii) the embedding of methods of evaluation within the network to enable the assessment of the effectiveness of this approach at enhancing student learning.
At the conclusion of the requested funding period, the ChemPRIME consortium will have built and tested an introductory chemistry course for use at two different levels: the traditional science majors course and the chemistry for citizens level. The lessons learned in developing the database at the introductory level, in establishing routes for students to access information and activities in the resource, and in linking the database to information classically treated in other non-science disciplines will be applied to the ongoing development of organic and upper-level analytical, inorganic and physical chemistry components of the resource. These upper level courses will have been assembled and preliminarily tested by the end of the funding period. The end product of this work will be a dynamic hyperlinked curriculum consisting of text, graphics, calculations, animations, videos and interactive exercises for use in any educational context and at any level in the undergraduate curriculum.
A: An Example - ChemPRIME in Technological Education: As a case in point, chemical technology students at two-year schools have special requirements that will make excellent use of this resource. The focus on applications of chemistry in the exemplars and the incorporation of pictures and videos of industrial settings and processes within certain tracks will be of high interest and relevance in technological education. Laboratory simulations and access to virtual instrumentation via integrated laboratory experiences will enhance the exposure of the students to sophisticated equipment, and the ability to select pre-laboratory introductions, explanations and simulations will augment the actual hands-on laboratory experiments. Ultimately the integration of text, laboratory experience and digital output from instruments will coalesce in an electronic laboratory notebook in which the students will learn and apply the newest modes of data collection, treatment, management and report writing. Using the networked environment of the ChemPRIME resource, we will also design cooperative learning teams among students to simulate the team approach to solving industrial problems. Clearly, this approach will not only benefit the technology students but also the science and engineering majors.
B: An Example - ChemPRIME as a Tool for Outreach: Bridges from this course will be built toward new interdisciplinary efforts linking chemistry concepts to business via chemical economics, to journalism and English via a seminar treating science in science fiction, and to primary and secondary education courses via didactic sections on how to teach chemistry concepts in the K-12 environment.
Regarding the use of this resource for teachers in the K-12 setting, Joseph Elias of the School of Education at Kutztown University (letter in Appendix D) and Chair of the ChemPRIME Chemical Educators Advisory Group views the possibilities as "exciting and endless." Because secondary education majors in chemistry roster the science majors curriculum, we will capitalize on the opportunity to include didactic features as options within the resource to enhance its utility as an instructional database. Pedagogical information will be linked to chemical principles and their real-world manifestations. In the traditional curriculum, students first learn chemistry and then later in another course confront the issue of how best to teach it. The ChemPRIME resource will enable instructors and students to integrate these activities, and the built-in evaluation tool will enable faculty members to assess if the integration improves learning and performance.
Elementary teachers, who typically do not take the science majors courses, will have a similar opportunity at the citizens level to appreciate the relevance of chemistry and to develop teaching methods, demonstrations and activities at a level appropriate for the elementary student.
4. POTENTIAL IMPACT AND SIGNIFICANCE
The ChemPRIME educational resource will change how students learn and what and how faculty members teach. It will also broaden the impact of chemistry across other disciplines in higher education. ChemPRIME is both evolutionary and revolutionary in its presentation. The content of the resource will be well-grounded in the classical chemistry curriculum and will be immediately useful in the traditional course-based sequences in American colleges and universities. Its selection of topics and tracks is an extension of the recent trend to make science more pertinent by tying chemistry more closely to materials and processes that are part of the students' everyday lives. However, it is revolutionary in terms of its flexibility and the options it extends to both faculty members and students.
ChemPRIME will give the power to faculty members to create new courses, to forge exciting new links to other disciplines, and to respond to the needs of students from many different backgrounds and with diverse interests. It empowers students in the sense that it will provide them with options to study principles in a context that they select based on their own interests. Furthermore, it will enable students to review information easily from any point in their studies or to dig more deeply into concepts that intrigue them. Finally, because systems for evaluation and assessments are built into the database, ChemPRIME will give all users the ability to measure progress toward the goal of educating students at all levels in chemistry.
5. PROCEDURES AND METHODS
A: Developing the Content of the Resource - the Curriculum: The curriculum will be designed around basic principles and will consist of multiple topical tracks. The outlines for the introductory, organic, analytical and physical chemistry courses including lists of exemplars appear in Appendix A. How the database can be used to create a customized, upper-level course is also shown for silicon chemistry in Appendix A.
The lists of exemplars are presented as initial evidence that the creation of multiple redundant exemplars to teach an ordered sequence of principles is an achievable goal. We fully expect these lists to grow and evolve as additional contributions are received from colleagues in academe and industry. Examples from the introductory course are shown in Fig. 1 [p. 13-14]. Chemical principles to be covered comprise the first track, and exemplars for this material are listed under four additional tracks from which the student may select: Consumer, Health, Environment and Materials. Linked series of exemplars form tracks through a course. Students select the track they wish to follow for each principle; they may progress through the entire course on one of the five tracks or jump from track to track as they advance from concept to concept. Implicit in this design is the ability of an instructor to select a particular depth of treatment and track for a given group of students (chemists, nurses, engineers, education, non-science majors), or for students within one class to customize their learning as their interests dictate (pre-medical students, chemistry majors, biology majors).
The hallmark of this approach is ultimately increased flexibility for the student and the faculty member. For example a faculty member could initially suggest a totally traditional path for students to follow. Ideally as the comfort level of both students and faculty increases with the use of this resource, the power of the students to direct their learning by selecting a path through material dictated by their own interests and the power of faculty members to customize new courses will bring increased excitement and creativity to the task of learning and teaching chemistry. Traditional boundaries between disciplines will naturally blur due to the multidisciplinary character of the exemplars, but the core knowledge of chemistry will be retained by the clear and intentional organization of each exemplar around defined statements of input knowledge and exit skills required by the students navigating the resource.
The ChemPRIME project ultimately envisions a single data base that is the curriculum, unifying the subdisciplines of chemistry and related components of the collateral sciences and mathematics. Individual courses will be demarcated routes through the subject matter with all material interlinked in a hypertext network. From the students' perspective, a course becomes a subset of information and multimedia presentations within the total network. A course is a seamless and continuous path through a subject area, but this path is linked via highlighted words and graphics to the entire database. Thus students taking biochemistry at an advanced level can push back into the analytical or organic subset or even to the introductory level and with a simple keystroke review a concept they need to use: for example, buffering capacity, first-order kinetics or the mechanism of an esterification reaction. Correspondingly, motivated students will be able to jump ahead or sideways into material for enrichment -- students in analytical chemistry may select additional information on the mass spectroscopy of biopolymers; students in physical chemistry may seek information about semiconducting properties of silicon; students in any course, reading the names "Friedel-Crafts," may link to a discussion of who these scientists were and what they discovered.
A strong linkage between experiment and theory is important for students to acquire and retain knowledge and thinking skills. Laboratory experiments will be embedded in the text to make the connection between experimental results and principles clear. However, laboratory time is limited. ChemPRIME relieves this situation. Laboratory experiences will be presented two ways: in the traditional style of a laboratory experiment to be executed by the student as a "hands-on" activity, and as a simulation consisting of interactive animations and video. This extends several options to the faculty member: the students may actually run an experiment or run a simulation. Furthermore, several simulations can be selected. The exposition of a topic can be either based on or reinforced by experimental results; the experiments and simulations will be nested within the text to allow an inquiry-based learning mode as an option for any or all parts of the course. In ChemPRIME, the link between theory and experiment will be more frequently, explicitly and efficiently made. Students can experience a laboratory at every stage of their acquisition of knowledge and skills.
B: Developing the Content of the Resource -- Learning Styles: Educational experiments will be built into the curriculum at the outset. In addition to options for the use of the laboratories as a function of teaching mode, units of text will be specifically designed in several formats to optimize learning for students with different learning styles.
A significant challenge in implementing the parallel tracks and learning-styles options of ChemPRIME is the decision about how many formats are needed to accommodate the variability in the student audience. Real differences in interests exist among students. Evidence indicates, however, that only a few learning styles predominate, and that students characterized by these different styles cluster in certain majors. Our choice of five parallel tracks will therefore be supplemented by two learning styles options. The sufficiency of these options will be evaluated throughout the study (Appendix E).
Experts on evaluation of learning styles (Wilkes and McCormick; vitae included) have agreed to join this project as outside consultants. They will use Gordon's Typology of Cognitive Styles and the Meyer-Briggs Type Indicator to evaluate students and faculty. Of the four learning types defined in Gordon's Typology, we will write initially for the two extremes -- the Problem Solver, associated with a knack for intuitive problem solving by making connections between diverse elements, and the Problem Finder, associated with a facility for diagnostics and conceptualization. These extreme types are of particular interest for this curriculum because they are not only the masters of very different tasks but they have been observed to have polar opposite reactions to different science curricula. Changes designed to appeal to one group often succeed at the expense of the other. 3Miller, J., Wilkes, J., Cheetham, R., Goodwin, L. (1993), "Tradeoffs in Student Satisfaction: Is the Perfect Course and Illusion?" Journ. of Excellence in College Science Teaching, 4, 27 - 47. With the ability to create options focused on reaching different types of learners, we hope to achieve what is today impossible: an optimal learning resource for orthogonal learning types in the same classroom. We will create exemplars to target these two extremes, and Wilkes and McCormick will measure how successfully we reach them as well as the total audience defined by the diagnostic tools. Further discussion of the evaluation may be found in Appendix E.
Self-tests for the students throughout the tracks will enable them to assess their progress. Built into the resource will be the ability to monitor how it is used by the students and by participating faculty; these data will be correlated to measures of the mastery of the material by the students by testing embedded in the program as well as traditional testing. In addition, data will be collected to enable the comparison of learning and retention for students in the ChemPRIME course to matched cohorts in traditional courses in the different learning environments represented by members of the ChemPRIME consortium. In all of these ways, several underlying assumptions will be probed, among them: (1) Do students learn better when empowered by choice? (2) Do students learn better and retain information more when it is presented in a topical format? (3) What kind of students benefit from different styles of presentation? (4) Is the computer-based education offered by ChemPRIME better than traditional textbook-based presentations? (5) Will accessibility to a hyperlinked multimedia database catalyze fundamental changes in the organization and content of the chemistry curriculum? Such evaluation will allow the retention, rejection, or improvement of components of the database depending upon the assessment of their pedagogical effectiveness and the frequency with which they are selected by students and faculty.
C: The Technology -- What is needed to deliver ChemPRIME: Although innovation in the teaching of chemistry is the focus of this project, modern computer-based technology is necessary to make the innovation possible. The technology required to build, implement and evaluate this project is in a rapid stage of evolution. The hyperlinked hypermedia database envisioned requires the use of either a CD-ROM or most ideally a World Wide Web (WWW) accessible local server system. In the longer term, a network will be the preferred route for students to gain access to the database, but over the lifetime of the project it will be necessary to have the resource available in both CD-ROM and networked formats to accommodate schools at various stages of computer readiness. Also at this time the WWW is not able to handle the fully interactive material, so CD-ROM presentations will be required to run those aspects of the resource. Small segments of the curriculum may be presented in standard paper format to test readability and student interest, but the very nature of the product requires the power of a computer network to manage the visual components and the hyperlinks.
The interface will employ HTML (the communication language of the WWW) regardless of the platform on which it is implemented. Documents that contain primarily text and graphics will be mounted immediately on the WWW as they are developed and certified. Use of documents that contain video and other resources sensitive to transmission time will be tested and may initially be available only through access to CD-ROM, as will lessons which have an interactive component. We plan to distribute ChemPRIME documents and lessons to each institution using either CD-ROM or transfer of the database, depending on the technology development at the institution, institutional preference, desire to access lessons, and results of studies during the development phase. CD-ROMs will be updated on a periodic basis as new documents and lessons are certified.
We will continually explore how technological advances change what ChemPRIME is able to deliver and how it is delivered. The initial minimum requirement to gain access to all documents and lessons will be a CD-ROM-equipped personal computer or workstation, either stand-alone or in a local area network. This will allow access to the documents making extensive use of video and animations and to lessons which, due to their use of video and interaction, require the most rapid access. All of the participating schools currently have the capability of delivering such materials to a portion of their students, although some schools are more completely equipped technologically than others. We do not anticipate that the interactive lessons will be network-accessible early in the grant period due to current limitations of HTML.
The second level of access will be by a networked system using a central server. The participating schools are a microcosm of the country in the spectrum of development of networks and hence provide an excellent testing ground for this technology. Lehigh, Lafayette, and Kutztown Universities have campus-wide networks, and Moravian and Northampton are coming on-line in the next year. Lincoln, Muhlenberg, Cedar Crest, and Allentown are in the planning/discussion stages. Lehigh expects to acquire asynchronous transmission mode (ATM) capability during the first year of the proposal.
All participating schools will use CD-ROMs and LANs for exploratory use of the documents and lessons developed during the first year of the project, and schools with WWW servers will experiment with networked access to documents. In the second year we will begin to explore how material containing video and other transmission-sensitive resources might be transmitted over networked lines across a campus or between institutions. The principal question to be explored is the access speed, particularly of video, under various load conditions experienced by the networks. Current network access at Lehigh, for instance, is by a shared 10 mbs line into individual dormitory rooms (including those of all first year students). Our initial timing experiments indicated transfer times of 10-60 seconds for video segments in the 5-10 megabytes range (maximum envisioned size). This may well be too long a period for the level of interactivity users have come to expect. The change to ATM should create virtually instantaneous access. It is unclear, however, what problems may still be unidentified in such a delivery scheme, and the project will explore this issue.
D: The Interface -- What will a user see? It is our intention now that we will code the personal computer viewer to run on both MS-DOS and Macintosh machines. We plan to develop the resource using a cross-platform language working on computers employing RISC-based Power PC technology. As part of the planning grant for this project, much work has been done on the design of the interface -- what the student user sees when the resource is accessed. As part of the alpha-testing process, a special faculty interface will be designed and implemented.
(i): The Student Interface: We have designed a custom viewer for use in gaining access to documents and lessons within the resource. The interface for the viewer looks identical whether on workstation or personal computer. The viewer handles the necessary addresses without requiring complex http strings and automatically recognizes whether the student is on line or not so that it may draw the correct resources from the WWW or CD-ROM. The viewer does not distract the user with unnecessary features -- the user does not "browse" like one does when "surfing the net." The viewer provides the structured setting a student will need to develop the skills of detecting the relevant amidst the irrelevant. The viewer will be customized to offer specific help and support as needed by the user, both for the chemistry concepts being presented as well as for the use of the viewer itself.
(ii) The Faculty Interface: Faculty members will certainly approach the resource through the interface designed for students, but instructors will need additional interfaces to help them adapt the resource for their own use. Faculty members must learn how to control the resource, and we plan a built-in guide called the Concierge to provide information and advice about structure, content and use of the database. Concierge will be developed as part of the alpha-testing program within the ChemPRIME group. We will also create workshops in the use of ChemPRIME and offer help sessions on the Internet to answer questions and assist in solving problems with the use of the resource.
(iii) Additional features offered by the technology: In addition to handling the volume of material and managing the sheer flexibility of options for presentation and evaluation, the CD-ROM or network offers the immediacy and excitement of a multimedia format at the fingertips of each user. Specific features of WWW access will be incorporated into courses and evaluated for their effectiveness. For example, an on-line cooperative learning environment will be created for courses to allow posting of questions and discussion with other students and faculty members in both the local environment or among schools. On-line interactivity, now being explored in the chemistry listservs, faces the logistical barrier of the extra effort required by students to move from their study materials to the Internet. In the ChemPRIME environment, asynchronous access to a faculty member will be a mouse-click away. Furthermore, an answer posted to one out-of-class student will be accessible to all students.
For a second example from the specific confines of a chemical economics course, chemistry students and business students will be paired with a chemist actually working in industry in a project-team approach to learning about acquisitions: how does a team decide whether to make a product, buy a product, or buy the firm that makes the product? What considerations go into risk-benefit analysis and how is that done?
E: The Timeline: Fig. 2 (p. 22-23) shows the timeline for five project years. The plan begins with intense work on the introductory course and outreach courses for business, educational technology, education and journalism/communications and gradually phases in and increases the intensity of effort on upper-level courses. Although packages of integrated exemplars will be "test-driven" as developed, the first semester of the introductory course will be completed by the end of the second year and the full course by the end of the third. Testing of ChemPRIME as the primary student "text" at alpha-sites will begin in the third year. Beta-testing will begin in year four. Although our group provides an adequate testbed for most situations, one group in higher education that is not represented in our core is the large state university. Art Ellis of the University of Wisconsin has expressed a willingness to be a beta-test site for ChemPRIME and thus provide us with a complete range of educational environments.
The preparation of the resource for each course requires five steps: (1) the selection of exemplars to illustrate fundamental principles; (2) the definition of the input and output knowledge for each exemplar; (3) writing exemplars for each track; (4) reviewing and editing each exemplar and insuring that parallel exemplars are equivalent; (5) linking the exemplars to the database. Steps (3)-(5) must proceed interactively and in parallel to enable the network linking the exemplars to be developed.
The initial design of the courses and the definition of input and exit knowledge (steps 1 and 2) will be completed on the following schedule: introductory course, 9/96; organic 12/96; analytical, 3/97; physical, 5/97; biochemistry and inorganic, 3/99. Major focus on the analytical and organic courses will commence on 6/97, with physical chemistry following in 6/98 and inorganic and biochemistry in 6/2000. Evaluations in alpha-sites will begin one year after the course receives a major focus. It is clear that additional contributing faculty will be required to complete these tasks, and the solicitation process for participants outside the core has already begun.
All types of chemists are represented in the author pool; hence, writing for all courses will begin as soon as the design is set, but initial work will focus strongly on the introductory course. Early focus will include the outreach courses for business, journalism and education, because these ancillary courses will use the introductory material most heavily; however, their development will lag behind that of the introductory course by six months. The full-year introductory course consists of 14 units, four tracks and two learning-style presentations plus hands-on and simulated laboratories.
A workshop will be conducted in the first summer by Wilkes and McCormick to acquaint the writing groups with the characteristics of the two different learning styles targeted as options and to advise the writers on how to create exemplars appropriate for both. The evaluation of the success of these options and the medium in which they are delivered will occur as the exemplars are field-tested to enable modification of the presentations as well as to assess the overall educational value of this aspect of the project.
The completion of the entire project will clearly take longer than the five years budgeted in this request. We have already initiated discussions with commercial publishers about this project with a view toward the creation of a saleable product that will be marketed and promoted by established vendors. In addition, as the project matures, we will seek the support of other organizations and foundations for its further development.
F: The Team: The entire ChemPRIME project team now consists of a group of faculty, staff and administration from various disciplines drawn from nine schools in Pennsylvania and an industrial advisory board (Appendix F) of four individuals with outstanding connections to major firms employing chemists. The organizational chart for the team is shown in Fig. 3, p. 25. This group has been augmented by the addition of several professionals in the field of educational evaluation and assessment, WWW applications and multimedia specialists, and faculty members from other institutions who have already declared their willingness to participate as authors and consultants (Appendix C).
(i) Organization and Division of Labor: The ChemPRIME core group consists of all senior faculty responsible for this proposal as listed in the budget. This group forms the Governing Board and will set policy, determine priorities, implement working strategies and monitor achievement. The Program Manager will handle day-to-day operations including communication, organization of meetings, recruitment of additional authors and other experts, and chair the Governing Board. Working groups are organized in terms of classical courses but are in fact a matrix. For example, the organic working group consists of organic chemists and collaborators with expertise in the topical areas defined by the tracks (i.e. materials, biological, health, environment). The collaborators work with all working groups and in practice form a network spanning all coursework groups. An Integration Group made up of the chairs of each working group is responsible for the integration of courses into the hyperlinked curriculum.
Working groups also exist for the outreach efforts in business, journalism, chemical technology and education. Contributing authors from outside the core faculty will work through their affiliation with a specific working group. The Interface and Lessons Design Group constructs and maintains the interfaces and the database. This group will serve as the liaison from ChemPRIME to campus computer facilities. They will also develop fully interactive lessons in collaboration with each working group. The Evaluation Group will develop strategies for evaluation and collaborate with each working group in incorporating assessment features into the resource. The Learning Styles Group will also interact with each working group.
Undergraduate Students: Student groups will be organized at three locations (Lehigh, Kutztown and Lincoln) to aid in the selection of exemplars. The students will provide input and evaluate material as it is being developed. The groups will be selected to achieve as wide a range as possible of student capabilities and interests.
High School Teachers: Involvement of high school teachers will be solicited and coordinated through a local chemistry teachers' organization, TEACHEM, which is chaired by a member of our Core Group. We seek the participation of this group at three levels: (1) writing exemplars; (2) developing and testing didactic materials with the Chemistry Education Working Group; and (3) advising on the adaptability of ChemPRIME as a resource for teachers at the primary and secondary education levels. A pilot program will be mounted in the second summer of funding and maintained during subsequent summers.
Contributing Authors: We have begun to assemble a network of authors who will contribute to the development of ChemPRIME from the community at large. Current members of that group are listed in Appendix C. These individuals have expressed an interest in participating in the development of this resource. In addition Thomas O'Haver (letter in Appendix C) has agreed to serve as a resource for WWW applications as well as for course contributions.
All authors will receive a ChemPRIME Style Guide that will provide them with instructions on how to prepare an exemplar for inclusion in the database. Understood under "exemplar" in this context is a section of text, an animation, a video clip, or an interactive lesson within a track. Authors might create an entire chapter in one track, four parallel exemplars on one principle, or simply one exemplar as a subunit of a single track. ChemPRIME will encourage small-scale efforts of individual authors. Authors will be identified for their contribution in the resource in a hyperlinked author-reference section and will receive compensation of $100 per accepted exemplar. The Editorial Board will interact with contributing authors and provide them with the Style Guide and an illustrative video of the interface and the operation of ChemPRIME as well as access via the WWW to web-compatible components to assist them in the production of their submissions.
A number of on-going or previously funded NSF projects readily lend themselves to inclusion in ChemPRIME. The groups who have prepared the multimedia text Chemguides at Franklin and Marshall College and the materials science companion by A. Ellis et al. have already expressed an interest in involvement with ChemPRIME (letters in Appendix C). Project at other sites (Virginia Tech and Cal Tech for their multimedia projects) are also likely resources. The teams at Beloit and Wisconsin who were funded in the first round of the Systemic Change initiative are clearly developing resources that could be incorporated into ChemPRIME and, if funded, we will certainly view them as collaborators, not competitors.
Video Capabilities: In-house video production for this project will be handled by the technical operations staff of Lehigh University's Distance Education facility. This facility includes two state-of-the-art, broadcast quality electronic classrooms. Each classroom is capable of live, interactive classes via video conferencing and satellite distribution; multiple cameras can be used in the production of high quality taped material. The classrooms feature robotic cameras, character generation, multiple videotape formats, photographic slide to video and computer graphics conversion. The facility also contains a computer controlled edit suite tied directly to the studios. An electronic field production package allows the taping of programs outside the electronic classrooms for later editing or integration into a live broadcast.
Planned for the spring of 1996 is a self-contained, fiber-optically linked remote controlled classroom capable of capturing live or recorded lectures and events. This system will allow multiple camera angles and high quality audio and includes a touch screen computer interface to create a video classroom in almost any lecture hall or laboratory.
(ii) Members of the Consortium -- The Institutions: The chemistry department of Lehigh University will coordinate this plan. Six of the nine participating institutions are members of LVAIC, the Lehigh Valley Association of Independent Colleges. LVAIC has a proven record of cooperation among the member institutions (Appendix G). Faculty are from: Allentown College, a Catholic institution, and Cedar Crest College, a private four-year women's college, both serving a local constituency with large adult education components; Kutztown University, a state institution with a significant program in teacher education which held NSF-sponsored workshops in 1993 and 1994 for college faculty in computerized data acquisition in the freshman level laboratory (Appendix H); Lafayette College, a private four-year college with a national and international clientele; Lincoln University, a historically black college; Moravian College and Muhlenberg College, private, four-year institutions attended by students primarily from the Middle Atlantic region; and Northampton County Community College, providing associate degrees and non-credit options for county residents.
The chemistry department at Lehigh has implemented an NSF-sponsored curriculum with a strong industrial co-op component in Chemistry of Materials Synthesis and Processing (Appendix I). Exemplars for upper-level courses will be developed directly from this activity for ChemPRIME. Members of the Chemistry, Biology, Physics and Earth and Environmental Sciences Departments at Lehigh have collaborated on the design of a fully integrated, topics focused science course for non-science majors (Appendix J). The Chemistry Department has been a -test site for the thematically based "Chemistry in Context." A joint Education-Engineering team has designed a similar course for science educators (Appendix K). For six summers we have received sponsorship from the NSF under the REU program (Appendix L), which has also been partially supported by industry. Lehigh is a leader in satellite chemical education, offering the only program in the nation for a complete masters degree by satellite (Appendix M).
6. ANTICIPATED RESULTS
A: Use of the Resource by Faculty: ChemPRIME will be unmatched as an instructional resource. Faculty members will have a number of options for presenting a course. They may: (1) Select a specific strand through the material which would focus on the underlying chemistry. A faculty member could teach a traditional course, focusing on principles. He or she could set the range of options available for the students -- select specific exemplars for all students to work through or allow the students to study whatever exemplars they wished. (2) Select a specific track of interest for the students to follow. For example, in a class for student nurses and medical technologists, the entire course could be taught using the Health track. Goals for learning in this case may be drawn to some extent from the fundamental material and also from the information in the exemplar. (3) Teach from a mixed selection of exemplars, with the students choosing whatever track interests them most. Goals for learning could be defined from the fundamental material and from exemplar-specific illustrations. The latter material would be tested by allowing the students to choose to answer one question out of four, each one of which is drawn from a specific exemplar. (4) Select a blend of simulations of laboratory experiments and hands-on labs for inquiry driven approaches to teaching.
The Concierge will be available to instructors to help them select and construct the options for the presentation of their courses. Concierge will help faculty members understand and manage the flexibility of the database to customize courses.
B: Use of the Resource by Students: We have produced an 18-minute video of a user signing on and navigating the ChemPRIME resource. Appendix B includes representative print-outs of the interface seen by a student in a working session. The key features of the interface are: (1) a log-in screen where the student identifies him- or herself by name and password. This can be coded to a class list so that the student is immediately placed in the section of the database that deals with the designated material for the correct class. (2) The student may customize the appearance of the interface on the initial visit; if a student subsequently wants to change the visual features of the program (font size, background color, hotwords in a different color than text or not), this may be done this at any time. (3) The student selects the chapter or topic to be covered (kinetics, thermodynamics, acid-base, polymers), the subtopic (rate laws, free energy, polyprotic acids, polyamides) and then selects the track to be followed (basic, consumer, health, environment, materials). (4) When the student exits the database, the program records the student's location and returns the student to that spot when he/she re-enters. All the introductory screens do not have to be paged through once access is established.
An additional feature of the interface is an electronic notebook into which the student may take notes and also cut-and-paste text, formulas and graphs from the database. This can be copied to disc and then printed to create a traditional notebook. A molecular modeling program as well as computational capabilities will be available for student use within the resource.
Appendix B contains six detailed scenarios called "ChemPRIME in Action" describing how six different students might use ChemPRIME. The scenarios are summarized here to illustrate the use of the resource by students with different abilities, learning styles and levels of preparation.
Scenario (1): "The Anxious First-Time User" is a computer-shy student whose confidence is nurtured by the interface that encourages him to interact and guides him painlessly into using the database on both his personal computer and a workstation.
Scenario (2): "The Student with a Lab Science Requirement" finds it useful to watch videos of experiments several times to really see what is happening. Seeing a graph generated right along with experimental measurements done on the video ties observations and graphical presentations together in a way that really shows what the graph means.
Scenario (3): "The Chemistry Major" enjoys the multiple perspectives on science provided by the parallel exemplars and takes advantage of the opportunity to probe material at a greater depth. A strong, independent learner takes advantage of the possibilities for enrichment -- for going beyond other members of the class by navigating through hotlinks to advanced material.
Scenario (4): "A Student without WWW Access" uses ChemPRIME on CD-ROM. As a non-native speaker of English, this student likes to select a larger type size to make the text easier to read and to use the hotwords to clarify definitions without having to dig elsewhere in the text. Because the instructor in the course has listed a number of acceptable documents and lessons written by different authors, the student can select instructional materials that match his needs and "speak" most directly to him.
Scenario (5): "The Slow Learner" finds the ability to repeat the same fundamental material in varied presentations and approaches a real learning aid. This student finds that the hypermedia documents, with video and animations, are more helpful than hypertext documents. Using ChemPRIME, she has found her optimal learning style, and the resource enables her to progress through the material in the way that suits her best.
Scenario (6): "Cooperative Learning" is possible when students work together and benefit from the team approach to studying.
C: Impact across the University: The database is designed to be attractive and useful to colleagues in other disciplines on campus. At Lehigh, faculty in the Engineering and Business colleges are involved in efforts in curricular reform that will be augmented and enhanced by ChemPRIME. Their plans to offer new courses in science and technology to prepare students in engineering and business for joint projects have been curtailed due to staffing pressures. A letter (Appendix D) from the Associate Dean of the College of Business and Economics offers the assistance of the faculty in that division in consulting on and writing business oriented links to our primary material in addition to writing business oriented exemplars. They are eager to collaborate on using ChemPRIME to integrate business, economics and chemistry to prepare new learning experiences for their students; correspondingly, we are eager to explore opportunities for chemistry majors to learn about the financial side of the chemistry industry.
The ChemPRIME network will make possible linking pertinent information now found in a series of chemistry courses into a package tailored for use by students in a cooperative learning program in chemical business. Case studies requiring decisions about acquisitions, marketing and risk-benefit analyses will link into the ChemPRIME database for information about the science behind the products. Needs for specific information from the business sphere will in turn drive the inclusion of industrially oriented content in the exemplars.
The Chairperson of Communications and Journalism at Lehigh (letter in Appendix D) supports the ChemPRIME initiative because she believes it "will be even more successful [than current courses] in helping students who are afraid of science realize how important the subject is for them." The chemistry department has offered "Chemistry and National Issues" for non-scientists that is rostered by students in Journalism and Communications, and many of the issues broached in that course will be raised in ChemPRIME. A new freshman seminar confronting students with science and its societal implications is being designed to get students who are not interested in science more intrigued. We intend to build links into the ChemPRIME database that will enable the resource to be tapped by such students in learning about the science behind social and political issues.
The Dean of Engineering at Lehigh (letter in Appendix D) has expressed his interest and pledged faculty support for the use of ChemPRIME by engineering students. In addition the University's Learning Innovations Program Advisory Committee (letter in Appendix D) has endorsed this project. Clearly, Lehigh promises campus-wide interest, encouragement, support and adoption of Project ChemPRIME.
7. EVALUATION
The ability to evaluate the effectiveness of the learning resource is an essential feature of ChemPRIME. Five major evaluative functions are included: (1) assessment of the effectiveness of principles-grounded, exemplar-based presentations of principles in a hypermedia environment compared to traditional chemistry instruction; (2) internal competitive evaluations of the effectiveness of each exemplar compared to parallel exemplars as a vehicle to facilitate learning; (3) assessment of the usefulness of the learning styles options; (4) measurement of how the technology used in delivering the learning resource impact the learning process and the sense of satisfaction of students and faculty; (5) the effectiveness of the hyperlinked, hypermedia presentation in catalyzing the creation of new courses and new means of teaching on the part of faculty members. In addition to traditional evaluation protocols, the computer-based resource will allow the collection of detailed information about actual use by students and faculty members of various features.
The methods of evaluation and their incorporation in the database will be carried out by expert consultants as discussed elsewhere in this document and in detail in Appendix E. We have assembled a professional evaluation team from outside the core chemistry group that will be responsible for evaluating these innovations. This team will be chaired by John Wilkes (Worcester Polytechnical Univ., Worcester, MA) and includes Keith McCormack (CCPS), B. James Hood (Middle Tennessee State), and Ward Cates and Kathy Lee of the Leadership, Instruction and Technology Division of the School of Education at Lehigh.
8. DISSEMINATION OF RESULTS
The ChemPRIME project is about innovation, and the literature 4 Rogers, E. and Schoemaker, F. F. (1968) Communication of Innovations: A cross-cultural approach. New York: Free Press. 5 Schoell, W. and Guiltinan, J. (1990) Marketing: Contemporary concepts and practices (4th ed.) Boston: Allyn and Bacon. is clear on one major point: innovations of any kind are not easily implemented. Recognizing that several stages of behavior characterize how widespread and rapid the adoption of innovation will be, we have incorporated features in the ChemPRIME project to increase the likelihood of dissemination of our results and to increase the rate at which effective innovations will be adopted.
The six major stages in adoption and the ChemPRIME responses are:
(1) Awareness: A paper 6 ref. 1. has already been presented on this project. A WWW homepage for the project has been established and used to solicit contributing authors. We note that the homepage is listed in several other web sites under "other places to go for chemistry information." We will continue to present papers, update the Web site, and publish results with increasing frequency throughout the lifetime of the project.
(2) Interest: ChemPRIME is generating interest among educators in chemistry who are in touch via the Internet and among those active in using the WWW as an educational resource. The WWW site is currently accessed over 100 times per month, and a listserv has been created for more specific communication.
(3) Evaluation and (4) Trial: By soliciting authors for exemplars from across the nation and even worldwide, we will spread understanding of what the project is about, encourage interest in the capabilities of the resource, and finally engender willingness on the part of faculty members at other institutions to "test-drive" a section of a course in the ChemPRIME format. As exemplars are tested and modified based on feed-back from students and faculty members, a desire for more presentations in this style of ChemPRIME will be created, increasing the willingness of the community to continue the development and dissemination of the resource.
(5) Decision and (6) Confirmation: Because of the flexible design of the resource, it will be possible for faculty members to test sections of ChemPRIME within a traditional course over short time-periods without putting an entire semester at risk. Individuals will be intrigued to try more if the innovation proves as attractive as we believe.
Five factors have been identified 7 Schoell, op. cit. that affect the rate of adoption of innovation, and here, too, we have structured the project to ease the difficulties associated with change. The factors are:
(1) Relative advantage -- How much better is this that what we have now? ChemPRIME will augment the traditional single document used in a class, the textbook, with a variety of electronic documents, the ChemPRIME resource. The documents will consist of text, interactive lessons, graphics, and animations linked in a hypertext network. With embedded assessments, we will constantly probe the fundamental question of whether or not this is a better approach and establish the relative advantage of the ChemPRIME resource over traditional textbook based instruction for both students and teachers.
(2) Compatibility -- How well does it fit in with what we do now? The flexibility of ChemPRIME will make it possible for a faculty member to select a path comparable to a standard course and use the resource as a new mode of presentation. Because of the integration of the parallel tracks, the resource will provide as much choice among the available options as faculty members and students can handle. The technology used to present the integrated multiple exemplars makes it possible for the resource to fit perfectly within what instructors are doing now while extending a here-to-fore unprecedented opportunity for instructors to put together new courses and present material to students in different ways. The ChemPRIME resource will encourage the practice of teaching creatively: incorporating new materials, skipping material that is judged unimportant; contributing original material. The project will make more material available in greater variety than instructors currently have, packaged in a format that is readily accessible.
(3) Complexity -- How hard is it to learn to use? Learning to use the resource must occur at two levels: faculty members must learn how to control it and structure their courses; students must learn how to navigate it and focus on specific learning objectives. Concierge for faculty and the special interface for students were described previously as aids to help both populations make maximum use of the resource.
(4) Divisibility -- Does it have to be tried all at once, or can one sample a little at a time? Users may implement as little or as much of the approach as they wish. Our approach to development and testing assures that early users will receive materials already tested and refined. Our testbed will produce results that enable us not only to adopt what works but also to reject what does not. Our plan is to make ChemPRIME documents and lessons as divisible as possible, thereby increasing interest in trying it and consequently increasing the rate of adoption.
(5) Communicability -- How hard is it to tell what it is, how it works, and what it has to offer? We will generate a large testbed by soliciting authors from the chemistry community at large, who will, first, have an understanding of what ChemPRIME is, and second, have an interest in testing the product they have helped create. In addition to this grass-roots approach, we intend to use the venues of papers at meetings, publications in the literature, and the ChemPRIME homepage to promote the availability and use of the resource. Finally, we will also interact with other NSF funded projects in systemic reform and curriculum development to build a wider human network for sharing ideas and developing materials.
Fig. 3: COMPOSITION OF THE GROUPS: Governing Board: all Core faculty; Project Manager: Schray; Working Groups: (chair underlined); Intro: Vitz, Foster, Kraihanzel, Martin, E. Smith, M. Smith, SubbaRao, Walters, Zeroka; Organic: Schray, Foster, Griswold; Analytical: Roberts, Berg, E. Smith; Physical: Zeroka, Klier, Walters; Biochemistry: Schray, Heindel; Inorganic: Kraihanzel, Martin, M. Smith; Chemical Education: Elias, Bazler, Reck; Chemical Technology: E. Smith; Business: Moesel; Journalism: Foster, Friedman, Schray; Interface Lessons and Design/Programming: Cates, Lee; Editorial Board: Foster, Kraihanzel, Vitz; Learning Styles: Wilkes, McCormick; Integration: Schray, Foster, Roberts, Vitz, Zeroka; Evaluation: Wilkes, Cates, Hood, Lee, McCormick; Publicity: Vitz, Foster, Schray; Industrial Liaison: Heindel