In addition to textbooks and periodic charts, today’s well-equipped Chem 1A student also carries a clicker. This radio frequency device lets students participate in classroom quizzes and surveys, and encourages interaction between them.
alex pines
mark kubinec
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(above) Chemistry lecturer Mark Kubinec in a screen shot from the new online Chem W1A course. The course is being offered this summer for the first time. (directly above) Photos of blackboards that long-time Chem 1A professor Alex Pines drew before the beginning of lecture.
Graduating senior Laura Driscoll gets a hug from her sister after commencement. Driscoll credits her chemistry training for helping her get accepted to a neuroscience graduate program at Harvard.
majors. Most of the students took chemistry in high school, where the chemistry courses are traditionally fact-based. We make our course more engaging by changing roles on them—we make the students explain answers to us. In Chem 1A quizzes and exams, there are very few fact-based questions. Memorization is not the goal. Memorizing facts might get you a ‘B.’ Chem 1A stresses critical thinking and linking chemistry to the world around you.” As an example, she cites a test question about candle wax. Candles can be made from paraffin, beeswax or soy-based wax. Students are given the chemical structures and thermodynamic data of each and asked which wax is most likely to burn cleanly without producing soot. Paraffin is a pure hydrocarbon, but beeswax and soy wax contain oxygen. “Here’s a hint,” says Douskey, “why do we oxygenate gasoline?” Keeping track of the progress of several hundred students, and keeping them engaged, is a chore made easier by the introduction of clickers. Berkeley Chem 1A pioneered the use of clickers in 2001, many years ahead of other universities. Clickers are hand-held devices, similar to TV remote controls, that allow students in the classroom to vote in response to questions. Clickers use radio frequency technology to record student responses to in-class polling. Student clickers cost about $35 new and can be bought used and resold at the student bookstore. The use of clickers enabled the development of quiz-based pedagogy by instructor Mark Kubinec and professor Alex Pines. Says Kubinec, “In Chem 1A, we’ll ask a question and project three possible answers on a screen. As the students vote, a histogram shows the distribution of their answers. “Next,” says Kubinec, “we ask the students to converse with their neighbors and vote again.” Kubinec believes that, when used in conjunction with teaching methods designed to take advantage of them, clickers make the class come alive. “The students interact not only with the instructor, but with each other,” he says. “I can’t imagine teaching Chem 1A without them.” Adds Douskey, “The clicker software also allows GSIs to look at the in-class quiz results, so that they can identify the concepts that students are struggling with. The old-fashioned alternative is to have students raise their hands during lecture, but clickers are faster and more anonymous—a nervous student who wouldn’t raise his hand will hit a button on his clicker.” Jeni Lee, now a second-year bioengineering Ph.D. student at UC Davis, took Chem 1A at Berkeley in the fall of 2006. Says Lee, “I personally thought it was a great course, especially for incoming freshmen. It was just so nice to have an interactive, fun sort of learning environment for a lower-division required course. The clickers are a great learning tool to make students pay attention and apply things you learn pretty immediately. I wish more classes were like Chem 1A.” Although Chem 1A is a service course, a course designed for non-majors, every year several students switch their major to chemistry after comparing their experience in Chem 1A to their other freshman courses. Laura Driscoll was one of those students. She came to Berkeley with the goal of studying neuroscience in grad school. She took Chem 1A in the fall of 2007. Says Driscoll, “I had taken the usual AP