Beyond “Inert” Ideas to Teaching General Chemistry from Rich Contexts: Visualizing the Chemistry of Climate Change (VC3)

As one approach to moving beyond
transmitting “inert”
ideas to chemistry students, we use the term “teaching
from rich contexts” to describe implementations of
case studies or context-based learning based on systems thinking that
provide deep and rich opportunities for learning crosscutting concepts
through contexts. This approach nurtures the use of higher-order cognitive
skills to connect concepts and apply the knowledge gained to new contexts.
We describe the approach used to design a set of resources that model
how rich contexts can be used to facilitate learning of general chemistry
topics. The Visualizing the Chemistry of Climate Change (VC3) initiative
provides an exemplar for introducing students in general chemistry
courses to a set of core chemistry concepts, while infusing rich contexts
drawn from sustainability science literacy. Climate change, one of
the defining sustainability challenges of our century, with deep and
broad connections to chemistry curriculum and crosscutting concepts,
was selected as a rich context to introduce four topics (isotopes,
acids–bases, gases, and thermochemistry) into undergraduate
general chemistry courses. The creation and assessment of VC3 resources
for general chemistry was implemented in seven steps: (i) mapping
the correlation between climate literacy principles and core first-year
university chemistry content, (ii) documenting underlying science
conceptions, (iii) developing an inventory of chemistry concepts related
to climate change and validating instruments that make use of the
inventory to assess understanding, (iv) articulating learning outcomes
for each topic, (v) developing and testing peer-reviewed interactive
digital learning objects related to climate literacy principles with
particular relevance to undergraduate chemistry, (vi) piloting the
materials with first-year students and measuring the change in student
understanding of both chemistry and climate science concepts, and
(vii) disseminating the interactive resources for use by chemistry
educators and students. A novel feature of the approach was to design
resources (step v) based on tripartite sets of learning outcomes (step
iv) for each chemistry and climate concept, with each knowledge outcome
accompanied by an outcome describing the evidential basis for that
knowledge, and a third outcome highlighting the relevance of that
knowledge for students.