Excellence in teaching

DR BOB BUCAT, senior lecturer in the Department of Chemistry, received an Excellence in Teaching Award in 1988-the first year of the awards, and the year in which UWA celebrated its 75th anniversary. This year he received a grant from the Committe for the Advancement of University Teaching (CAUT) for a project entitled ' Design of a pool of constructivist tasks for learning chemistry'

There is accumulating research evidence, including some of my own with students in the department, that, despite what exam results suggest, many students achieve no more than algorithmic, compartmentalised and disjointed (exam passing/) understanding. Interviews that scratch below the surface of the subject matter confirm this for me time and time again.

All of this reaffirms my comfortableness with the constructivist views of knowing and learning, the basic tenet of which might be simply expressed as knowledge cannot be received-it is constructed in the mind by interaction of new experiences with what we already know. And so teaching, in a highly conceptual subject like chemistry, should recognise the importance of students' idiosyncratic prior knowledge, and might use strategies that provide opportunities for active construction of meaning. This is not the place for a discourse on constructivism, but I should emphasise, perhaps defensively, that I am not talking about spoon-feeding. On the contrary, acceptance of this view of learning puts more responsibility on the students to make sense of their world.

This project has been concerned with strategies that might be used, perhaps in conjunction with traditional lectures, to encourage sense-making. These strategies demand reflection and even struggle by students, and are often well suited to collaborative interaction among students. The main purposes are clarification of concepts, differentiation between concepts and the construction of linkages between related concepts.

Lots of types of strategy of this sort have been described in various places. Here are just a few samples or descriptions:

• The answer to a question on acidic solutions is pH 4.5. What might the question have been?
• Here is aproblem and a wrong sulution. Spot the error.
• Here is the solution to a problem. What was the problem?
• Here are the instructions for a procedure in the chemistry laboratory-in scrambled order. Unscramble them.
• Here is a column with a list of steps in a laboratory procedure and another with a list of reasons. Match each step with the reason for doing it.
• Computer spreadsheets, with 'what if?' exercises.
• Use of Venn diagrams to show inclusive/exclusive relationships.
• Buliding concept maps to show linkages between concepts and the nature of the relationships.

There are a myriad of others, and none of them is original to this project. But there are few examples available that are relevant to chemistry at the tertiary level. And while many lecturers might find the ideas appealing, who has the time to think through more than an occasional example? With the asistance of research officer Todd Shand, this project is compiling a pool of specific thinking tasks of this sort in three broad areas of chemistry: chemical equilibriam in aqueous solution, thermodynamics and organic chemistry.