This presentation will outline the development of an innovative module at the University of Strathclyde which is available to all students studying at Strathclyde. UNESCO has been promoting Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) since 1991 and is now spearheading its follow-up, the Global Action Programme on ESD. Global issues urgently require a shift in our lifestyles and a...
PANDA is a new peer mentoring programme established at the start of the 2020 academic year for all students in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Glasgow. In this scheme, current students from Level 2 or above are matched up to new students to mentor, buddy-up with, or otherwise provide an additional layer of pastoral support to them. All new students who are either...
Engagement is frequently correlated with student success. However, this alone does not imply causation. The abiding educational challenge is to engage everyone in an effective and academically credible fashion. To this end, we have created a synergic combination of digital technologies in the form of a flexible escape activity hosting social problem-solving activities appealing to the...
COVID social distancing restrictions and absences due to self-isolation have caused significant issues for implementation and assessment of undergraduate laboratory classes. Here we describe a pre-laboratory simulation to support an open ended undergraduate chemistry practical class. The simulation also provides students who are unable to complete the laboratory work with personalised model...
Reducing our environmental impact and increasing sustainability are of ever increasing concern to society and these ideals are also important to many of our students. The principles of Green Chemistry1 provide guidance on how to make chemical processes more environmentally friendly and embedding these principles into undergraduate teaching will raise student awareness of how we can continue to...
Drug discovery, particularly at the early stages, involves an understanding of both the chemistry of the potential drug molecule and the biological environment with which it interacts. This exercise pulls together all these different components that they have been taught across their degree programme into one capstone coursework exercise over eight weeks. The simulation allows students to...
Two courses -General Chemistry in level 3, and Integrated Chemistry in level 4- have had new continuous assessments and reflective journals added to support students' revision and performance in our honour year General Chemistry exam paper and oral exam, and to improve engagement with assessment and feedback in general. Several new assignments were added this year in light of Covid-19...
During the COVID-19 pandemic, universities across the world have been forced to adapt their undergraduate degree courses. This has been particularly challenging with practical STEM subjects such as chemistry. Approaches have included the use of online videos, virtual reality or ‘dry’ laboratories and the reduction of teaching laboratory capacity to enable social distancing. The reduced ability...
Coding has become a highly sought-after skill in STEM careers over recent decades [1]. Consequently, the Institute of Physics recommends that undergraduate physics students enhance IT skills, such as coding and becoming familiar with a programming package [2]. While some undergraduate students will have encountered coding during their secondary school education, for many students, their first...
Higher education Science Departments aim to produce graduates that are comfortable with assessing multiple sources of information and applying their understanding to solve complex problems. This is reflected by graduate employers who often deem problem solving to be an essential skill. This Faculty funded collaborative project between the Departments of Chemistry and Physics aims to analyse...
In this session I will discuss the use of LabBuddy to prepare students for a second-year investigatory Chemistry practical, and how this fits with a programme of blended learning. LabBuddy allows a student to prepare their own script for a practical; effectively forcing them to think about what they will do at every step, including if unexpected outcomes are encountered.
Staff and student...
Design Technology, as a subject in secondary school, has a variety of scientific thinking, content and approaches that are not fully appreciated or successfully linked back to the more ‘academic’ subjects. As a somewhat early application of engineering at a pre-higher education level there are a significant amount of opportunities to cross link both maths and physics to the practical and,...
From the perspectives of students, introductory courses, focusing on core concepts and problem-solving approaches, can feel disconnected from the global challenges and fundamental questions that inspired them to pursue science generally, and chemistry more specifically. Particularly for those students majoring in the biological sciences, organic chemistry can seem tangentially related to their...
Positive attitudes and feelings towards chemistry have been shown to correlate with student persistence and performance[1-3]. Students who enthusiastically join the chemistry community when they enter Higher Education will understand and value its knowledge and practices. To do so, they should have the confidence to participate in its scientific discourse, which could include discussions with...
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a significant increase in the use of online teaching approaches as part of blended or entirely-remote learning strategies in Higher Education. This increased use of online approaches has resulted in some debate over how students engage with these remote activities and the technologies used to support them.
The Chemistry programmes at the University of...
It had been noted that our chemistry graduates from under represented ethnic groups often had greater difficulties gaining relevant employment. This observation is supported by national and international studies.(1,2) Increased diversity of backgrounds and ideas in the workplace is recommended as it brings a broader range of perspectives and expertise into play.
It was concluded that there...
Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual versions of a number of the Durham University Level 1 Laboratories were developed during the course of the 2020-21 academic year using LabVIEW, a systems’ engineering software [1]. The kit that was developed focuses on some of the circuit laboratories undertaken by students at the start of the module, which have the dual purpose of...
Development of a 3D printing workshop to aid student comprehension of shape and isomerism
Molecules and reaction transition states aren’t 2D, yet we continually expose our students to 2D representations of these chemical concepts in textbooks, presentations and lecture notes. This can result in students experiencing difficulty in mentally “translating” these 2D representations into their...
Peer Instruction (PI) was first developed in the United States (Mazur, 1997). Although research shows that PI contributes to a positive learning gain (Fagen et al., 2002) and improves students' attitudes and beliefs about physics and learning physics (Zhang et al., 2017), little is known about the generalizability of its effectiveness in other countries. One cannot assume that such...
We examine the coursework attainment of two cohorts of around 170 first year physics students each: one group from before the pandemic and one who were taught remotely during the crisis. We compare like for like results on comparable weekly set work over a 20 week academic year, how engagement with coursework changed over the course of an academic term and fatigue set in, and how increasing...
The climate change CLPL session has been developed to discuss the implications and possible solutions to the climate emergency on a local & global scale, alongside easily accessible but effective supporting practical's to visualise and engage.
The session will reflect on the impact of delivering this CLPL to over 200 primary & secondary teachers with a discussion on the impact that this...
Learning strategies are techniques commonly used when attempting to understand, learn or retain material. Spanning a range of lower and higher order approaches, the learning strategies chosen by students within a single undergraduate cohort can vary significantly [1]. A variety of factors can affect the learning strategies an individual uses, with personal motivations being one such factor...
Since its emergence and spread across the globe, COVID-19 is continuing to impact higher education. As instructors, it has forced us to adapt, to accommodate national lockdown restrictions and diversify the way teaching can engage students. This has meant that the inclusion of online teaching methods and tools into undergraduate Chemistry modules has been necessary for content delivery and...
The research aims to explore the reasons why undergraduate Chemistry Students (studying Chemistry in 2021) within the School of Physical Sciences (SPS) at the University of Kent, Canterbury Campus (UKC) study Chemistry. The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) have reported that the number of Chemistry undergraduate applications have decreased in recent years (Turner, 2020). There is an assumption...
Extracurricular workshops were offered to undergraduate students at the University of Birmingham on modelling the spread of infectious diseases. The MATLAB-based exercise exploring the classic S-I-R epidemic model drew upon and extended the students’ knowledge of chemical kinetics. Rate equations of the Consecutive Reactions Scheme and the changes in the concentrations of the reactant,...
In chemistry and science in general, instructions are often presented with multiple external representations, such as texts and pictures in static or dynamic ways. Several well-established theories, for example, the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (Mayer, 2009), the Cognitive Load Theory (Chandler & Sweller, 1991), or the Design-Functions-Tasks Framework (Ainsworth, 2006) help...
For more than a decade, the National Atomic Energy Commission (CNEA) of Argentina has been developing and promoting e-learning and blended-learning actions for students and professionals in Physics and Nuclear Engineering in the country and the Latin American and Caribbean region. In 2008, one of CNEA's academic institutions, the Balseiro Institute, received the Sadosky Prize in Educational...
This presentation will provide an overview of an ongoing project to introduce active learning to the undergraduate physics curriculum through blended learning and interactive demonstrations. Flipped classroom approaches and teaching resources have been developed and used for several physics courses and modules. In parallel, over the last three years a bank of experimental demonstrations have...
One of the main issues in the online delivery of modules during 2020/21 academic year was to create asynchronous materials that would keep students engaged. These materials were also supposed to be valuable for students, help them gain the necessary knowledge and grasp the syllabus.
On King’s International Foundation Programme, in Mathematics for Natural Sciences and Foundation Physics...
With increasing student numbers, limited lab space, and restricted access due to COVID-19, it has been more important than ever to make sure programmes that include core practical modules (such as Chemistry) are maximising the use of the lab time available to them. Inspired by the flipped classroom model, we aim to create a ‘flipped lab’ where students can use synchronous lab sessions most...
During the global pandemic, the University of Oxford set up and co-ordinated a multi-institution online open-access project promoting women working in the chemical sciences. The project provides an opportunity for girls aged approx. 10-14 (Upper KS2-KS3 or equivalent) and their supporters to engage in creative and enjoyable practical challenges linked to current chemical sciences research at...
This undergraduate student led project looked at student motivation in undergraduate chemistry during blended learning due to Covid-19.
A survey was developed using self-determination theory and the science motivation questionnaire (SMQ II).
The motivating factors studied were intrinsic motivation, self-determination, competence, autonomy, relatedness, and extrinsic motivation. In addition,...
Summer exam cancellations have meant that, in addition to the usual secondary-to-university transition challenges, students who started university last year have had little to no recent high-stakes exam experience. Future cohorts are also affected by the continued disruption to exams. This mixed-methods study investigates the experiences of undergraduate physics students when sitting...
We present a summary of work carried out principally as an undergraduate summer project in July – August 2020 to investigate the use of analogies in physics teaching in the undergraduate course at Imperial College London. As a background, we first compare and contrast methods for classification of analogies and provide literature review highlights relevant to practitioners of university level...
The benefits of a blended approach to learning are widely documented, where improvements in either student outcomes, understanding or engagement have been identified. In response to the current pandemic, most educators and students have had to adapt to an online blended learning approach. This presentation investigates the student experience and engagement observed by the academics...
In response to an institutional initiative aimed at Decolonising the Curriculum, a small research project was conducted to obtain the views of undergraduate students in Chemistry and Forensic Sciences (Chemical Sciences). This comprised a short survey and semi-structured interviews. The survey was circulated to all undergraduates in Chemical Sciences and three interviews were conducted.
In...
13-17% of students studying for a Life Science degree at university have a disability. Of these students, about 30% have a learning disability (AdvanceHE 2020). Inclusion across education contexts is critical to acknowledge and inspire the full potential of people with learning disabilities (Gilson, 2020). These group of students are given extra support by the University. However, how...
Our medicinal chemistry teaching involves two team-based assessment items: a Drug Design Exercise (level 5) and Drug Action Presentations (level 6). This poster explores how we adapted and delivered these in an online only environment during the COVID-19 era of 2020-21.
We discuss the decisions involved in which elements of teamwork to maintain, the practicalities of moving online, and...
The second year course Analytical Techniques in Biochemistry is a compulsory module for the biochemistry and chemistry students at the University of Exeter. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we decided to streamline the course to ensure the students were not overloaded and to embed Covid-19 into the module. One of us (AMS) had developed an antibody test for Covid-19, and ethics approval was...
Team Based Learning (TBL) is a structured, small group, collaborative form of learning where learners combine their knowledge to solve problems. TBL has been found to be highly effective at facilitating active learning as learners are required to prepare in advance of sessions and discuss potential solutions to problems with their peers. Despite being relatively underused in the physical...
We present a thermodynamics experiment suitable for first-year undergraduate students employing Stirling Engines to create a demonstration of energy transformation and to measure the mechanical efficiency of such engines. Using an inexpensive transparent chambered Stirling Engine, students can connect concepts such as the theoretical pressure-volume diagram with the physical movements of the...
In intensive undergraduate courses marred by Covid-19 the use of technology can aid delivery of effective laboratory demonstrations. Finding innovative ways to deliver laboratory content to a student cohort relying on remote access was a challenge and at the University of Birmingham we employed the use of ManyCam. ManyCam software can be used live in streaming platforms such as Zoom to allow...
