Building Bridges to Material Properties in General Chemistry Laboratories: A Model for Integration Across Disciplines

Abstract

Many engineering students enter and exit general chemistry courses with little appreciation of chemistry's relevance to other fields. At WPI many of these students go on to take introductory materials science and arrive with poor attitudes about chemistry and little retention of key concepts, but then become more engaged as they discover connections to engineering applications. Consequently, instructors in chemistry and mechanical engineering collaborated to augment general chemistry laboratories with explicit "bridges" to material properties and applications. Evaluation results showed that while students' attitudes toward chemistry were unaffected by bridging, particular aspects of the students' lab experience were enhanced to a statistically significant degree. Similar crossdisciplinary collaborations might be considered elsewhere as a means of helping students find meaning and integrate subject matter, in a manner that is more feasible than large-scale course or curriculum restructuring.

Implementing A Cross Course Design Project

“…Some educators have combined the integration of the first year experience with seniors, having senior students work with first year teams 10 . Other educators have employed cross-disciplinary projects in order to expose students to a wider variety of problems, expose them to multi-disciplinary teams, and address ABET EC2000 requirements 11,12 .…”

An Integrated Laboratory Vs. A Traditional Laboratory, Is There A Difference?

“…Creating integrated labs have been the premise of many other studies in both engineering and multidisciplinary education. 2,3,4 The need to integrate and foster innovative teaching ideas was recognized by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the early 90's. In 1993 the NSF sponsored a seven school education coalition.…”