Dr. Jia Luo Innovation Award will bring changes to Chem 111

 

Dr. Jia Luo, General Chemistry Lecturer, and Director of the Chemistry Transition Program has been granted a College of Arts & Sciences Innovation Award to update the POGIL (Process-Oriented Guided-Inquiry Learning) exercises and introduce some course content videos for the General Chemistry courses.

General Chemistry is one of the first major STEM courses that a large population of our students takes during their first semester at Washington University. In order to prepare our students for a successful and fruitful undergraduate career in the academic environment at Wash. U., different active learning and flipped classroom strategies have been continually implemented in General Chemistry (Chem 111/112 series), including POGIL-style recitations (2009), i-Clicker activities (2014), and course content videos (Fall 2016). During this summer, the instructor team of Chem 111 plan to collaborate with the Olin Library and the Teaching Center to re-make some of the course content videos, and to revise the related i-Clicker questions, in order to better achieve the “flipped classroom” goal. In addition, we plan to revise the POGIL-style problem sets, such that the structured problems are truly in-line with the inquiry-based learning philosophy. Dr. J. Luo (Lecturer for General Chemistry), and Dr. M. Daschbach (Senior Lecturer for General Chemistry) will lead the project and complete the revisions. Dr. G. Szteinberg (Project Coordinator for General Chemistry) will assist the project as well.