Iowa State University Alumni Association| online edition | fall 2006
Going the Distance

 


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CHEMISTRY EXPERIMENTS WITH A NEW WAY TO TEACH

According to the Iowa State Education Association, Iowa is nearing a crisis in K-12 science education. The number of students in the education pipeline able and willing to teach science has been steadily declining since 2001 at Iowa’s three public universities.

Meanwhile, many districts struggle to fill open positions or move teachers trained in other areas into science
classrooms. To make matters more serious, almost 2,000 of the state’s current 13,000 science and math teachers are eligible to retire.

At Iowa State alone, there has been a 10.3 percent drop in students choosing to enter the teaching profession. And this is a national trend, according to the American Association of Employment in Education (AAEE).

While the reasons for this decline in student interest are many, Iowa State chemistry professors are working to make science education easier to understand with new language arts and computer simulation activities, creating experiments that are more hands-on and practical, and targeting efforts to improve science comprehension at all levels.

Led by Thomas Greenbowe, professor of chemistry, a group of researchers has early re-search results that appear to eliminate the science achievement gap between male and female students in science courses and improves student achievement at all levels of comprehension.

The project, “Technology Enhanced Guided Inquiry Workbook for General Chemistry,” was funded in 2001 with a $480,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. The new teaching method combines computer-simulated science experiments created by Greenbowe and his team with a science-writing-heuristic (SWH) curriculum researched by professors in the College of Human Sciences.

SWH encourages students to write results of experiments as if explaining the experience to their Aunt Viola in Ottumwa. It focuses on inquiry, reasoning, and constructing logical arguments from investigations.

Greenbowe noted that high-achieving students learned better using the SWH and simulations but that low achievers gained even more benefit. The new method also appears to eliminate the gender gap. The research comes from 700 ISU students enrolled in freshman chemistry courses.

Professors hope that the increased comprehension and fun that students experience from the new science teaching method will translate into more future
teachers choosing to enter science classrooms.

Read on | The campaign for chemistry

About the Writer | Kevin Brown is a freelance writer from Pleasant Hill, Iowa