Guiding students to become practicing scientists entails teaching them the specialized ways of collaborating, writing, and thinking that these professionals utilize every day. Laboratory experiences provide unique opportunities for student-centered curricular activities that mimic these skills. The biodiesel laboratory experience described here connects previously published biodiesel exercises in an intentionally scaffolded experience that models for students the types of collaboration and communication skills they will need if they choose to enter a STEM profession. The collaboration is vertically scaffolded to span multiple courses (general chemistry, organic chemistry, and physical chemistry) with opportunities for future connections with additional upperdivision courses. The experience is writing intensive with a focus on both scientific writing through formal laboratory reports and writing for communication with nonscientists. By encountering this experience repeatedly throughout their chemistry coursework, students have the opportunity to develop the habits of working scientists.
This paper describes and assesses
the impact of a new upper-level
“scholarly” laboratory model that is part of a four-year
scaffolded research skills curriculum at a Carnegie Bachelor’s
institution. In this scholarly lab model, students gain the “tools”
of a discipline in a first-semester laboratory and engage in the scholarly
work of the instructor in the second semester. Analogous to the experience
of graduate students in a research rotation program, undergraduates
participating in these scholarship-based laboratories in addition
to their capstone research requirement are exposed to chemical research
in multiple subdisciplines as well as different scholarly strategies
to conduct research. Student perception data show that scholarly lab
students feel highly engaged in all steps of the scientific method
and that they integrate, implement, and improve the research skills
gained throughout the four-year research skill curriculum. Authentic,
student-driven collaborations within and between courses were observed
multiple times in the two pilot iterations. However, the model was
less effective than anticipated at building student confidence and
sense of inclusion in the scientific community. Participation in the
scholarly based laboratory model led to a statistically significant
∼10% improvement in lab notebook, final presentation, overall
lab, and overall course grades for the scholarly lab cohort compared
to a traditional lab cohort in a second-semester physical chemistry
course. College-assigned women and men benefit similarly from the
scholarly lab model, though these groups show some important perception
differences that are discussed.
Integrative, research-based experiences
have shown tremendous potential
as effective pedagogical approaches. Pharmaceutical development is
an exciting field that draws heavily on organic chemistry and biochemistry
techniques. A capstone drug synthesis/analysis laboratory is described
where biochemistry students synthesize azo-stilbenoid compounds and
test the biological activity of those compounds as well as a known
inhibitor on mushroom tyrosinase using UV/vis-based kinetic assays.
In this paper, three such successful azo-stilbenoid inhibitors of
tyrosinase, representative student generated data, technical aspects
of the experiments, and an interpretation of student feedback on the
project as a whole are presented.
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