---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 23 Oct 1995 08:40:00 EDT From: to2 Subject: Discussion archives now available on Web page For those of you who may have come in late, or who may wish to review the previous discussion related to this conference, there is now an additional option to access previous messages. The conference Web page at: http://www.inform.umd.edu:8080/EdRes/Faculty_Resources_and_Support/ ChemConference/FacultyRewards/home.html now has links to the daily discussion logs. Just click to view, print, or save. Tom ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tom O'Haver Professor of Analytical Chemistry University of Maryland Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry College Park, MD 20742 Maryland Collaborative for Teacher Preparation (301) 405-1831 to2@umail.umd.edu FAX: (301) 314-9121 http://www.wam.umd.edu/~toh/toh.html ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 23 Oct 1995 10:05:04 EST From: Howard Kimmel Subject: Re: Doyle paper A concern i have with Doyle's paper is in regard to the following statement: >Teaching may be the primary focus of liberal arts colleges, but is the >expertise that is formulated in this environment transportable to other >institutions and environments? The answer is general "no", the teaching >"innovation" is specific to a particular individual, department, or >institution, and this is to be expected. I do not have hard research evidence on this, but i would certainly disagree with this generalization (as with others he makes). I would like to hear what others think. But i would hate to think that we are working in such isolation that nothing we do in education is transportable. If this was true then there is a lot of wasted effort going on in the orginization and participation in conferences in this country. First of all, the acceptance and use of textbook in institutions other than the author clearly shows the lack of validity of doyle's generality. But since he probably doesn't consider textbooks as innovation (true, many aren't, but there are some that are). To name a couple that pop immediately into my head and are currently in use, the Treisman (forgive my spelling) method in mathematics and the Overview Case Study Physics are innovative teaching approaches that have been adopted (or adapted) to other institutions. Remember that inovation does not have to transportable exactly as it was developed. Certainly, adaptation also counts. There are many others around that have gone beyond the institution in which they were developed, which can be found if one reads the literature. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Howard Kimmel New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark kimmel@admin1.njit.edu >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 23 Oct 1995 10:41:56 -0400 From: Jack Martin Miller Subject: Re: Doyle paper >A concern i have with Doyle's paper is in regard to the following statement: >>Teaching may be the primary focus of liberal arts colleges, but is the >>expertise that is formulated in this environment transportable to other >>institutions and environments? The answer is general "no", the teaching >>"innovation" is specific to a particular individual, department, or >>institution, and this is to be expected. >I do not have hard research evidence on this, but i would certainly disagree >with this generalization (as with others he makes). I would like to hear >what others think. But i would hate to think that we are working in such >isolation that nothing we do in education is transportable. If this was true >then there is a lot of wasted effort going on in the orginization >and participation in conferences in this country. I agree with Howard Kimmel's comment --- if this point of Doyle's were true, why would we have a Journal of Chemical Education, thes electronic conferences, starting with Tom O'Haver's orignial, the Chem. Ed. sectons of the ACS etc. Inovation in teaching, for example, a large first year class would be as applicable in a "Research" University, an ordinary University, a Liberal Arts Institution of a Community College. Jack Martin Miller Professor of Chemistry Adjunct Professor of Computer Science Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, L2S 3A1. Phone (905) 688 5550, ext 3402 FAX (905) 682 9020 e-mail jmiller@sandcastle.cosc.brocku.ca http://chemiris.labs.brocku.ca/staff/miller/miller.html ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 23 Oct 1995 09:36:44 MDT From: Reed Howald Subject: Re: Doyle paper >I presume from the context of your discussion, Brenda was refering to a K-12 >engineering curriculum that could be used in public schools. (This is >something >that NSF refers to as 'pre-engineering' curricula.) I too would be interested >if anyone on this conference has experience with developing and delivering >some kind of pre-engineering curricula to public schools. I do not believe that this exists. For K-6 the topics of mathematics, measurement, science, and engineering should not be separate. But we have hardly scratched the surface on providing this, and what little there is is often poorly done. It is apparently essential that we emphasize experiment for "concrete" learners. I would like to cite an example which I encountered yesterday trying to help a ninth grade student with algebra homework. The text is Roland E. Larson, T. D. Kanold, and L. Stilf, Algebra I, D. C. Heath, Lexington, MA (1993) ISBN 0-669- 26750-3. The problems are numbers 28 and 29 on page 169. 28. Chemical Mixture. Your science teacher instructs you to add 10 milliliters of Solution B, which is 70 % water and 30 % citric acid, to 20 milliliters of Solution A, which is 80 % water and 20 % citric acid. How many milliliters of acid are in the combined mixture? What % acid is the combined mixture? 29. Chemical Mixture. You are still in the same science class (see exercise 28), and your teacher says that she didn't want you to pour all of solution B into solution A - just enough to raise the acid percentage to 22 %. How much of solution B should you have poured into solution A? The answer to the first part of question 28 is not 30.0 milliliters. Volumes are not additive in mixing solutions. Citric acid is a solid, and there is no way to accurately measure its volume to prepare a solution. A 30 % solution of citric acid encountered in a science class will almost certainly be 30 % citric acid by weight. The densities at 20 degrees Celcius in grams per cubic cm are: water 0.998206 20 % soln. 1.08635 22 % soln. 1.09583 30 % soln. 1.13476 where the last figure is uncertain. For the process of preparing 25.00 grams of a 22 % solution by adding 5.00 grams of the 30 % solution to 20.00 grams of solution A, 20 % citric acid by weight, we have: weight volume soln. B 5.00 5.00/1.13476 = 4.40621 cm^3 soln. A 20.00 20.00/1.08635 = 18.4103 sum 22.8165 final soln. 25.00 25.00/1.09583 = 22.7728 The students would need to do this particular experiment with four figure accuracy to show the discrepancy, but volumes are not additive on mixing solutions. A more reasonable way to prepare a 22% solution from 20.00 cm^3 of solution B would be to add pure water: 30 % soln. 22.6952 g. 26.6952/1.13476 = 20.00 cm^3 water 11.3476 11.3476/0.998206 = 11.3680 sum = 31.368 22 % soln. 34.0428 34.0428/1.09583 = 31.066 cm^3 Even with graduated cylinders ninth grade students can observe a 3% decrease in volume on mixing. Sincerely, Reed Howald Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Montana State University Bozeman, MT 59717 "uchrh@earth.oscs.montana.edu" ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 23 Oct 1995 11:28:12 -0700 From: Kevin Karplus Subject: Re: National Conference on College Teaching At the request of a few of the members of the Chemconf conference, I've looked up more information about the National Conference on College Teaching and Learning March 20--23 1996 Marina Hotel, Jacksonville Florida The conference is run by the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning at Florida Community College, and costs $325 (with a variety of discounts for groups, students, award nominees, ACM members, ...). There will be a proceedings (selected papers, not all), but I'm not sure if it is available at the conference, or only a year later. I can't type in the 20 or so pages of the infromation packet they sent out, and they don't seem to have bothered to create a web site to distribute this material (despite having a "featured presentation" on using the internet and the world-wide web). You can probably get more information by contacting Bill Martin (904)632-3155 wmartin@fccjvm.fccj.cc.fl.us ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 23 Oct 1995 11:39:43 -0700 From: Kevin Karplus Subject: local event on theme for this conference UCSC is pursuing the same questions this e-mail conference is, on a campus-wide level. We have recently had a talk by Lee Shulman of Stanford University (on "Teaching as Community Property") and will soon have the following: ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Dear Colleagues: I am writing to invite you to attend this upcoming event, where we will consider ways in which the scholarship of teaching might become more publicly discussed and acknowledged. Cordially, Leo Laporte Associate Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education Forum on the Scholarship of Teaching Thursday, November 2 4:00-5:30 P.M. Crown 208 The second year of participation by UCSC faculty in the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) Peer Review of Teaching Initiative continues with this event on November 2. The project is designed to invent and promote strategies for faculty to serve as professional colleagues to one another in teaching. Participating faculty provide more robust documentation to the teaching portion of their personnel files to support their competence and effectiveness as teachers. Faculty from Chemistry, Music, and Computer Engineering will discuss their experience with peer review and share samples of reflective essays they wrote to document their teaching in the pilot effort of last year. Members of the Senate Committee on Teaching will explain the "Instructor Course Assessment" form (ICA), by means of which an instructor can outline what s/he is doing in a given course, why, what worked and what didn't, reflecting on past performance and future prospects. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Eileen Tanner, Coordinator Phone: (408)459-5091 Teaching Support Office Fax: (408)459-8206 107-B McHenry Library E-mail: eileent@cats.ucsc.edu University of California Santa Cruz, California 95064 Kevin Karplus karplus@cse.ucsc.edu http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~karplus Due to budgetary constraints the light at the end of the tunnel is being turned off. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 23 Oct 1995 18:45:35 CDT From: Brenda Mokijewski Subject: Re: Discussion archives now available on Web page I do not have web access at my institution. Is there some other way to download papers presented before October 22, 1995 so I can read and make pertinent analyses of these other papers? Brenda Mokijewski Physical Science Division Troy State University, Troy, AL ------------------------------