Assistance in handling large-enrolment, introductory General Chemistry courses

Introduction

McGill University is a public, English-speaking institution located in Montreal in the Province of Quebec, Canada. The official language of the province, however, is French. The reason that McGill University can function in English is that the it was established by Royal Charter, granted by King George IV of the United Kingdom in 1821, i.e. well before Canadian Confederation in 1867 and the Quebec Charter of the French Language in 1974, when French became the official language of the Province of Quebec. Consequently, McGill students can present their written work (term papers, exams, theses) in either English or French and, conversely, English-speaking students at the French universities in Quebec can submit their written work in English if they so wish. McGill University is named after a Scottish immigrant, James McGill (1744–1813), who became a wealthy Montreal merchant chiefly through the fur trade. Some facts about the university are shown in Table 1 for the period 2016–2017. From these data, it is evident that almost half of the students come from outside of the Province of Quebec. Of these, there are many international students who come from over 140 different countries, with the top five countries being the USA, China, France, India and Saudi Arabia. This unique situation has presented some educational challenges for the university because, in 1967, the Government of Quebec established the pre-university Collèges d’enseignement général et professionnel (CEGEPs) by combining the last year of high school and the first year of university to make post-secondary education more accessible in Quebec and to provide proper academic preparation for the subsequent 3-year (U1, U2, U3) university undergraduate degree programs. The introduction of this new system meant that students coming from outside of the Province of Quebec would therefore need to do a 4-year degree program thus necessitating the introduction of U0 courses.

The Faculties of Science and Engineering at McGill require all their U0 students to do introductory courses in Chemistry, Physics. Mathematics, etc., and these courses have large enrolments, often over 1000 students. The backgrounds of the students in Chemistry, and Science in general, are quite varied. For a few other students, who are enrolled in the courses, Chemistry is a terminal subject and they are taking the course as an elective. In a typical year, the breakdown is approximately Faculty of Arts (6 %), Faculty of Music (1 %), Faculty of Education (3 %), Faculty of Engineering (30 %) and Faculty of Science (60 %). Around 8 % of the students indicate that they intend majoring in Chemistry.

The two U0 Chemistry courses (CHEM 110 in the Fall semester and CHEM 120 in the Winter semester) are each 13-weeks long. The former course typically covers topics such as Quantum Theory and Atomic Structure, Electron Configuration and Chemical Periodicity, the Shapes of Molecules and an Introduction to Organic Chemistry. The latter one deals with topics such as Thermochemistry, Kinetics, Acids and Bases and Chemical Equilibria. Both courses have a laboratory component that counts 20 % towards the final grade and the standard breakdown of the rest of the grades is Midterm-1 (20 %), Midterm-2 (20 %), and Final Examination (40 %). The lectures are team taught in each case by three professors. The sheer size of the enrollments and the absence of a room that can accommodate everyone means that both courses need to be split into two sections. In the largest lecture room on campus, there are about 700 students, who are on a 1-h Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, while in another smaller lecture room, there are about 400 students on a 1.5-h Tuesday-Thursday schedule. Each instructor teaches both sections for a segment of the 13-week semester. The lectures are all recorded and are available online within 24 h or less after the lectures end through a Desire2Learn-based learning management system known as MyCourses. The PowerPoint slides for the lectures are posted prior to the actual classes and the students can download these slides either as hardcopies or they can follow the lectures on their own laptops during the classes. Some students cannot attend the lectures because of other conflicts. In addition to the lecture material, there is an extensive tutorial system available. There are four main graduate teaching assistants (TAs), one of whom meets the students on a weekday evening for an optional 1.5-h tutorial that typically accommodates 40 students. Another TA organizes assignments and pre-readings through an online homework management system called Connect – this system is associated with the textbook that we are using, which this year is the 2^nd Canadian edition of Silberberg, Amateis, Lavieri, and Ventateswaran (2016). The students can gain up to 5 % on their final grade if they decide to do the Connect problems online; this part of the course is completely optional, especially since not all the students buy the textbook. To support, one-on-one tutorial support, a drop-in U0 science help centre called FRezCa, that is run four days a week is staffed daily by one TA and three-to-five undergraduate mentors in conjunction with other major U0 science classes. All three Chemistry professors and the four TAs respond to questions that the students submit online through a joint-access email account and on a Discussion Board, which is part of the MyCourses platform. Additional help is provided through a comprehensive exam preparation review tutorial called ChemCram, and the Residence Chemistry Traveling Roadshow. Finally, there are twelve Tomlinson Mentors, who are undergraduate students who have excelled in previous year’s classes and receive a small honorarium for assisting our TAs with answering students’ questions.

Before we give specific details on the various ways in which we are currently providing additional support to our U0 students, we should mention some of the related approaches that have been tried in other universities to handle the large enrolments in both Introductory Organic and General Chemistry courses. For instance, at Portland State University in Oregon in the USA (Wamser 2003; 2006), classes in these two basic courses are given in technology-rich lecture halls together with lots of computer visualizations and animations, ConcepTests, peer-led workshops, a course Web site, and a course management program (for online quizzes and a discussion board). An interesting feature of the Introductory Organic Chemistry course is that of “email molecules”. Students are required to respond by email to several questions about the molecule which has been assigned to them, including the proper name of the molecule, its molecular formula, the number of carbons that are stereocenters, family names of any functional groups present and the biological role of the molecule. In both courses, “peer-led workshops” were introduced to help students solve problems by working together in small groups, under the supervision of a student who had successfully completed the same course and had been trained to function as an undergraduate tutor.

The approach to learning material in large enrollment General Chemistry courses is well known to be appreciably different from that in high school. And, unfortunately, some students who had previously been highly successful in their senior year at high school often do poorly in their first year at university. In yet another approach to the large-class problem, part of the entering student cohort (about 200–300 students) in the General Chemistry course at Ohio State University in Columbus, USA (Clark, 2017), was recently required to attend “metacognition” sessions in which they were taught how to better approach their learning practices, such as realizing that it is indeed really beneficial to read the chapters in the textbook prior to the actual classes. In general, the students attending such metacognitive sessions performed better than those who did not, especially when the metacognition sessions were coupled to other learning strategies, such as peer-led sessions. The metacognition sessions were based on the suggestions in the book entitled “Teach Students How to Learn” (McGuire, McGuire, & Angelo, 2015). Classroom polling is another technique that has been undertaken at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, USA (Hunnicutt, 2005). Every lecture room than could hold more than 90 students was equipped with polling devices. The project has proved to be so successful that polling is now an integral part of the curriculum. Faculty members are using polling for taking attendance, providing feedback and encouraging students to engage in discussion with each other. Finally, efforts have been made to generate more enthusiasm in General Chemistry classes at the University of California, Berkeley campus (Stacy & Lewis, 2000) through the incorporation of commercial ChemConnections Modules^[1] and StudySoup^[2] into the lecture material. Some of these approaches going on at other universities for many years and may well be worth trying at our own university in the future.

Tutorial services for large classes at McGill University

ChemCrams

ChemCrams are 4–6-h marathon tutorials that are held by one of the TAs a week prior to each of the two midterms and the final examination. Typically, well over 300 students participate with some sessions topping 700 students (Figure 1). Throughout the school year, these tutorials are normally provided on a weekday evening (usually 6–10 pm) during official university operating hours at no additional cost to the Department. At times, owing to room availability issues, these comprehensive tutorials have been held on weekends necessitating some financial expenses for the room booking and payment of security guards. The funds for this experiment were generously provided by the Department of Chemistry, the Dean of Students, the Dean of the Faculty of Science, the Deputy Provost, and the University Registrar, so that there was no additional cost to the students. The whole idea was initially prompted by the fact that for several years some students have been attending third-party, for-profit General Chemistry tutorials that several private companies offer, sometimes on campus or just off it, for fees of upwards of $60–100 per session. The focus of our ChemCrams is on core concepts, the assessment of gaps in the students’ knowledge, and the type, difficulty and breadth of questions that could possibly be asked on the examinations. There was a marked increase in interest in Chemistry following these ChemCrams from 45 % who reported being interested or very interested in chemistry to 67 % afterwards. Their popularity has prompted colleagues in Physics, Mathematics and Biology to offer similar programs under the banner of “SciCram.” (https://www.facebook.com/SciCram/). In a feedback survey of students after the first two ChemCrams, 85 % of respondents reported ChemCram as helpful or very helpful and 85 % of respondents were very interested in seeing the continuation of ChemCrams in the future.

Figure 1:

A panorama of CHEM 110 students at ChemCram in McGill’s largest lecture hall.

Designing a ChemCram requires a lot of preparation and energy to be effective. Initially, we had two course TAs who, in addition to running weekly lecture and drop-in tutorials and administering homework, started the ChemCram program, which proved to be unsustainable. Currently, we have a TA assigned specifically for running two midterm and one final exam ChemCram and preparing supplemental resources to assist the students.

FrezCa (First Year Rez Cafeteria tutorials)

In collaboration with the Departments of Physics, Mathematics and Biology, the McGill Administration and the McGill Student Housing and Hospitality Services staff have created a first-year Science Help Centre that operates in the cafeteria of one of our residences on Monday–Thursday afternoons from 2:30 to 4:30 pm. The students gather here in a safe “student space” to work on weekly assignments, study course concepts and get help as needed from our undergraduate mentors, TAs, and instructors. This is an opportunity for one-on-one and small group support for U0 and U1 students in the Faculty of Science. Attendance is consistently high, approximately between 80 and 100 students appearing daily, getting busier before midterms and finals. Initial attempts at drop-in tutorials were held in classrooms on campus, which were not built specifically for peer-to-peer learning and were difficult to find before moving to the cafeterias. Even hosting a drop-in help centre in a comfortable location for students was not enough to maintain attendance, it was only when the Chem 110 Drop-In Centre was consolidated with that of our Physics colleagues that was attendance maintained. The continuity of assessments and examinations among the U0 Science and Mathematics courses provided the impetus for students to continue to attend FRezCa.

Residence chemistry traveling roadshow

Since one of our TAs happened also to be a Director of a student residence, he decided to offer drop-in tutorials at all the residences for small groups of U0 students and sometimes even for one-on-one tutorials by request before both the midterms and the finals Attendance at these rotating tutorials peaked at about 80 students who would receive both content and moral support as well as reassurance in the immediate days before an examination. Interestingly, this in-residence concept is not new as the first graduate student mentor at McGill was Harriet Brooks at Royal Victoria College in the early 1900s. She was also the first woman to graduate from McGill with a M.Sc. degree in Physics – under the supervision of Ernest Rutherford.^[4]

Laboratory

A significant part of the General Chemistry curriculum is focussed on laboratory work (20 %). These laboratories require considerable administration with around 1000 students to be accommodated each week. To streamline this process, an automated computer program has been developed to sort the students on the class lists into individual laboratory groups of 15–16 students, overseen by over 40 graduate student TAs. The laboratories themselves are held in our recently renovated space, which features novel circular benches (Figure 2). These benches result in improved group interactions compared to the more traditional linear setup. The students are required to watch both a safety video and an introductory video online before coming into the laboratory; both videos are accessible via the laboratory page on MyCourses. All other laboratory information is also available digitally through MyCourses, including the manuals at no additional cost. The manuals only become available to the students after they have watched both videos and completed an online quiz to demonstrate their understanding of the safety and course information. The manuals are html-based and include interactive elements that are scalable to mobile devices and are accessible via screen readers to students who have visually impairments.

Figure 2:

Partial layout of our General Chemistry laboratory.

The Periodic Trends manual includes interactive periodic tables that provide additional information when the students click on the individual elements. In this experiment, the students investigate the colour and visible absorption spectra of selected inorganic salts to determine the basis of their colour. Furthermore, in the Acid-base Titration experiment, a titration simulation is incorporated directly into the online manual itself. At the end of the second semester, there is an interesting capstone project in which the students are asked to research a laboratory experiment from the chemical education literature. To help in this aspect, the students are directed to a video available from the McGill Schulich Library of Physical Sciences, Life Sciences and Engineering that includes information on effective searching and how to access literature. We attempt to give students a wide berth in choosing something that really interests them, while directing them towards peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Chemical Education and various Chemistry Laboratory textbooks. The students, after consulting with their TA and the laboratory staff, develop a plan and a procedure for their own experiment. All the students then complete their experiment under the supervision of a TA. This unique approach has been greatly appreciated by the students and certainly stimulated their interest in the subject.

Conclusions

Our U0 students have had access to various methods of tutoring support over the past few years to help them in their General Chemistry courses and the average final grades in both courses have been consistently in the B+ to A− range (77–80 %) (Table 2).

With students continuing to perform at a high level and with a slight course restructure, it has allowed us to introduce two additional chapters of material: Electrochemistry and Nuclear Chemistry. Moreover, ChemCram appears to be the most productive tutoring method for our students who have vastly different academic backgrounds. We have tried several other approaches to improving our online resources and, perhaps not surprisingly, the most significant improvement is related to providing the students ready access to previous examinations. Since our teams of three professors change quite frequently owing to sabbatical leaves, there is no need to keep previous examination questions secret. One concern around providing ChemCrams, where problem solving of past examination questions is a major focus and releasing past exam materials are issues around rote memorization of similar types of questions, is that they do not support longer term retention and understanding of the skills and knowledge to be gained in the courses. In the latest iteration of the U0 General Chemistry courses, we have been creating entirely new questions with the help of our TAs in the hopes of linking concepts in a way that the students may not have seen before in their exam preparation materials. We hope that setting the expectation that the aim of these resources is to promote more opportunities for higher order learning will encourage students to think critically about concepts and how they relate to one another.

Finally, an additional approach that we plan to expand in the future is ChemCast that has been successful in our second-semester General Chemistry course. This consists of a series of short videos that provide online solutions to problems much like those in Youtube^[5] or Khan Academy^[6] videos. The videos feature solutions to past exams interspersed with questions to probe the students’ understanding of problem solving and to provide them with a more engaging and interactive learning experience. The videos have been well received with regularly 200–300 views per problem solution. ChemCast received financial support from SALTISE.^[7]