Sunday, February 17, 2013
Room 311 (Hynes Convention Center)
Recognizing that many institutions cannot afford to create or maintain entirely new interdisciplinary courses, we have developed resources that integrate biology and medicine applications into general chemistry lectures without requiring that chemistry concepts be removed from a course. With the goal of getting more biology and premedical students excited about and proficient in chemistry, we integrated thirty brief (two to five minute) in-class examples that relate each chemical principle covered in lecture to topics in biology and medicine. In addition to dramatically improving lecture attendance and course ratings, a multiyear assessment in collaboration with the MIT Teaching and Learning Laboratory revealed that these interdisciplinary connections increased student interest in chemistry, awareness of the role of chemistry in biological and biomedical research, and the realization that knowledge of chemistry is important for success in biology, medicine, and related fields.
Building on these examples, we have recently created a series of short in-class videos that capture the excitement of MIT research by featuring graduate students, postdocs, and professors discussing how a general chemistry concept is essential to their research and to an inspiring real-world application. This set of videos illuminates both the why and the who of chemistry: why chemical principles are central to important challenges across disciplines, and who chemists really are (not just the dead white men overrepresented in many textbooks and courses). Through a two-semester assessment examining the impact of the videos, students reported gains in their motivation to learn and to apply chemical concepts and in their appreciation of the diversity among scientists at statistically significant levels.
Creation and assessment of these resources was supported through an HHMI Professors grant, and all resources are free for educators to download through MIT OpenCourseWare.
