from Laura Slocum, JCE High School Associate Editor

Over the last few months, more high school chemistry teachers than ever before have asked me these questions and I was really surprised. However, as I inquired more deeply, I began to realize that fewer of the “new” teachers (teachers in their first 1–5 years of instruction) than ever before are able to attend regional and national conferences. As we all know, budgets almost everywhere are shrinking and it is more difficult for teachers, especially the new ones, to procure money for registration, travel, and lodging. I know that there are local ACS sections, individual school districts, nearby teachers, etc. looking for ways to honor and reach out to pre-college instructors, especially at the high school level. I find this very encouraging and want to recommend another avenue to help spread the word about valuable resources for educators at all levels.

The Division of Chemical Education (DivCHED) has an Office that you can contact to request materials for an event or presentation. Most of the materials are available FREE, and there is NO COST for the shipping if the materials are requested at least three weeks in advance of the event. These materials can include sample issues of the Journal of Chemical of Education, temporary access to JCE Online materials, information about DivCHED and how to join the Division, ACS Examinations Institute information, reduced cost gift subscriptions to the Journal, personalized gift Award Certificates and welcome packets, and more!

The Outreach Office can help presenters and event organizers provide informative and encouraging materials to attendees at no cost to themselves. I found that including these materials with my presentation packet often opened conversational doors where I could further encourage and support my fellow teaching colleagues in very real and tangible ways. I am so grateful to the many people who helped me to grow professionally. One of the biggest ways they helped me to grow was to encourage me to open myself up to greater avenues of challenge and support from DivCHED and the Journal.

Classroom Games

As spring comes to our classrooms, we often find our students getting a little more rowdy and ourselves a little less patient. How about trying a “break” in the middle of the week for everybody? In the April issue of JCE, Sevcik, et al. provide two card game approaches (p 514 & p 516) that teachers could use for “review” and give themselves and their students a break from the traditional classroom for that particular day. My students like a version of Taboo that we have played for the past two years. It is very similar to Capps’s Chemistry Taboo on page 518. I actually prefer Capps’s version, and I am going to try it the week before spring break. His scoring is significantly easier than mine. Why keep inventing the wheel? We should become better at using materials shared by others and giving credit where credit is due.

Multiple-Choice Exams

I also found the two articles about multiple-choice tests, Sundermann’s and Tellinghuisen and Sulikowski’s, provided insight as I begin to prepare my final exams for this year. During the 10 years that I served on the First-Year High School Exam committee for the ACS Examinations Institute there were many ideas and suggestions debated, but one of the hottest was the placement of the “wrong” answers. Tellinghuisen and Sulikowski state, “Our results demonstrate that performance on multiple-choice exam questions can depend strongly on the placement of questions and answers, with the answer order probably being the more important factor in the present observations…”. While serving on the committee, I learned how to accurately write valid questions that tested the concept that I really wanted the question to be testing. Serving on a test-writing committee was one of my strongest professional development activities. I encourage you to consider volunteering for a committee, too. You can do this easily by contacting the ACS Examinations Institute online.

Erica’s Take on the Issue

from Erica K. Jacobsen, JCE High School Editor

Mysteries abound in the April Amusements issue of the Journal of Chemical Education. A new author offers another installment in the chemical adventures of Sherlock Holmes. However, two other articles, while not in the style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, present their own mysteries. Yayon and Scherz (p 541) share their take on the black box. Students develop a model for the mysterious contents of a video cassette box. I like their addition of different tests for gathering data not normally collected in black-box experiments, such as magnetism and a simulated X-ray image. Eierman’s JCE Classroom Activity challenges students to investigate the secrets of a candle and how it operates.

JCE High School Chemed Learning Information Center (CLIC)