A Team Learning Method for Organic Chemistry

Abstract

Study of the use of small groups/teams to improve understanding in organic chemistry.

Cooperative learning in organic chemistry increases student assessment of learning gains in key transferable skills

“…In addition, even the ''lecture'' format course employed a personal response system (clickers) and contained some shorter periods of intentionally interactive learning, so this could have contributed to the lack of difference in our summative assessment results. These results confirm similar findings by several research groups who reported that changes in organic chemistry classroom formats did not significantly affect outcomes on summative assessments (Dinan and Frydrychowski, 1995;Bradley et al, 2002;Chase et al, 2013;Rein and Brookes, 2015). Interestingly, a pre-and post-test study for flipped versus lecture general chemistry classes (Reid, 2016) revealed that the ''exam performance in the two sections is statistically different only for the bottom third, as measured by pretest score or percentile rank'' (Ryan and Reid, 2016).…”

“…Indeed, a large-scale, double-blind, randomized study supported the theory that student-centered, active-learning approaches improve science content learning when compared to teachercentered approaches such as lecturing (Granger et al, 2012). While some recent studies have shown that organic chemistry content knowledge improves for undergraduate learners when they are in active learning classrooms as opposed to lectures (Hein, 2012;Conway, 2014), other studies have shown no differences in measured content knowledge outcomes (Dinan and Frydrychowski, 1995;Bradley et al, 2002;Chase et al, 2013;Rein and Brookes, 2015). We hypothesize that moving along the ICAP continuum toward the more interactive and constructive modes of learning in the classroom space will preserve acquisition of content learning while simultaneously improving learner confidence with important transferable skills such as teamwork, leadership, and collegiality.…”

“…Various types of active, cooperative, small-group learning classroom environments for undergraduate organic chemistry have been previously reported in the literature (Dinan and Frydrychowski, 1995;Bradley et al, 2002;Tien et al, 2002;Hein, 2012;Chase et al, 2013;Conway, 2014;Fautch, 2015), so this work drew from the successes and lessons learned by examining the prior work. The instructor of record for the sections in this study had been teaching general chemistry classes in a cooperative learning classroom format with small, interactive student teams for several years, so basic challenges related to logistics and handling student teams during class time had been thoroughly addressed.…”

Development of stable oxygen transport membranes

“…However, when using 'study-load' as an indicator for the processing and learning of theory it is justified to support that students cover more theory in the limited time by using the jig-saw technique. This confirms the findings by Dinan and Frydrychowski (1995) who showed that 14% more theory was covered as compared to more teacher oriented teaching. The answer to the overarching research question therefore is that use of expert groups in cooperative learning can be effective, but in this research not all conditions were met.…”

Effectiveness and student perspective of a pilot effort in team based learning in pharmacology for medical undergraduate

“…Team based learning (TBL) is one such new strategy used in various curricula in India and world-wide. [4][5][6][7] TBL was originally developed by Larry Michaelsen for business schools. 8 It is a learner-centered, instructor led strategy with individual and group accountability process and involves small teams to work together to solve problems.…”