John Moore’s June 14, 2010, post to this blog described recent changes to the Journal of Chemical Education. The decision was made to discontinue posting items to this blog that were published in JCE, such as the monthly Especially for High School Teachers column, which had previously formed a large part of the content on this blog.

This summer during a visit back to Madison, Wisconsin, John invited me to continue posting to this blog, with a view toward posts that simply relate to items of interest to the chemical education community, rather than published JCE items. Although I do not claim to be an experienced blogger, I welcome this opportunity to share in a less formal way. There are frequently pages from chemistry education-related mailings that I receive, where I’ll either turn over the corner or tear out a page that interests me. It often merely gets filed away to hopefully resurface at a time when it relates to something I’m working on. Many of these items would probably benefit a greater audience.

Yesterday, the Summer 2010 issue of The Magazine of the Chemical Heritage Foundation arrived. A lunchtime browsing resulted in two page tear-outs. The first was an article entitled “Lights, Camera, Action!”, which announced a Chemical Heritage Foundation video competition for high school students. The article describes: “The competition, ‘It’s Elemental,’ invites students to pick an element from the periodic table and tell its story through a short documentary-style video. The video competition, announced in March at the National Science Teachers Association convention, is one of the ways CHF will celebrate the International Year of Chemistry, designated by the United Nations for 2011. Winning entries will become part of an interactive periodic table available on CHF’s Web site.” There are two categories, for individual and group entries. The three to five minute videos are due January 7, 2011. In September, students may make their element selection, as only a limited number of video entries will be accepted for each element. Additional information is available here at the CHF Website. Students and teachers will find the Periodic Table Live! collection, which is part of the ChemEd Digital Library, a great resource for researching individual elements. JCE subscribers have access to the October 2009 periodic table-themed issue that was published in connection with last year’s National Chemistry Week theme, and was John Moore’s final issue as editor-in-chief of JCE.

The second “tear-worthy” page was a large graphic announcing a celebration of the 100th podcast of CHF’s Distillations collection. The podcast archive boasts a wide range of topics, including a recent offering on summer BBQ. The podcasts can be streamed from the Website or downloaded as MP3 files.

A report published in Nature last Thursday, August 4, describes the success of the computer game Foldit, which is designed to encourage people to contribute to research on protein folding and at the same time have fun. (The Nature article is restricted to those with subscriptions, but a layman’s description is here.) The success of this computer game in aiding what by all accounts is a very complicated area of research raises a couple of interesting points.

First, there are things that people do much better than computers. When a situation required out-of-the-box thinking, quick changes in strategy, or a long-term perspective, people were more successful than supercomputers. Given the ubiquity of data on the Web and the ease with which information can be found, these are exactly the qualities that education should be fostering in children. Unfortunately we educators often seem mired in memorization rather than harbingers of a new emphasis on process and application of knowledge. The success of people in aiding research on protein folding through a computer game should encourage us to redouble our efforts to revise and enhance the ways we encourage students to learn.

Second, if a computer game can contribute to research in protein folding, what might computer games be able to contribute to the educational process? Some advances have been made in using games to help students learn, but much more is possible. Perhaps we educators need to enlist the services of the computer scientists, or their colleagues, who devised Foldit to create new games that simulate other processes that we want students to explore. Although the article does not address this issue, I am confident that those who participated in the Foldit game/research learned a good deal ab0ut protein folding in the process. Why not apply this to other situations?

Finally, Foldit is a means for taking the energy and enthusiasm that people apply to computer games and harnessing that energy in a productive way that enhances science and society. Applying the same kind of thinking to enhancing learning would be a great thing to do.

Simulations Nab Protein-folding Mistakes

A recently reported psychological research study by scientists at Indiana University shows that if we think our students cannot do something because they are female or because they belong to a minority group, that alone is enough to reduce their learning significantly. It has been known for some time that negative stereotypes affect adversely performance on tests and in other skill-based acts, but this new study shows that negative stereotypes can also can inhibit actual learning. This is an important argument in favor of trying to avoid any stereotypes as we teach our classes, because our beliefs about students’ abilities and students’ perceptions of them can have devastating effects.

The study, “Stereotype threat prevents perceptual learning,” was published on July 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition. Co-authors are Richard M. Shiffrin, Kathryn L. Boucher, Katie Van Loo and Michael T. Rydell, all from Indiana University.

For a brief description of the study and its conclusions, click here.

Stereotyping in Relation to the Gender Gap in P…

The National Academies (including the National Academy of Science) in cooperation with several other groups are working on new science education standards that they intend will be adopted by all states. A major goal of such a project is to consolidate the many different sets of state science standards that arose in the wake of the original National Science Education Standards published about a decade and a half ago.

There is currently a call for comments on these standards and I heartily encourage you to read the current draft and send your comments. Here are relevant URLs

http://www7.nationalacademies.org/bose/Standards_Framework_Homepage.html

http://www7.nationalacademies.org/bose/Standards_Framework_Public_Draft_Cover_Letter.html

The NSDL Science Literacy Maps are a set of guidelines for what science should be learned at what level that may be useful to consult.

National Science Education Standards

Recently the New York Times reviewed four books, three recently published and one about to be published, that deal with geoengineering–the purposeful application of engineering techniques to alter planet Earth. A major goal of geoengineering is to offset climate change resulting from global warming. All four books conclude that there are great dangers in experiments of the magnitude that geoengineering requires and that there is no way to do safe experiments on a smaller, isolated system and then scale up. The reviewer adds that amid all of the discussion of what geoengineering experiments might be carried out, there is little or no discussion of who would decide whether to use geoengineering techniques and, if so, which to use.

All the while we continue a major geoengineering experiment–that of adding carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases to Earth’s atmosphere at an ever increasing rate. The countries of the world have not seemed able to agree on how to handle this current geoengineering experiment, so what makes us think they could handle other geoengineering designed to abate this one?

Does your school block access to the Web for students (and teachers)? Does this prevent you from using resources such as the NSDL and ChemEd DL as easily and successfully as you might? Take heart! The Racine Wisconsin school district is providing essentially complete access for students and teachers from all schools in the district. See this report for more information: http://bit.ly/cutsQi.

If you need ammunition to try to get access in your school, this might help.

Internet Access in U.S. Public Schools and Clas…

The American Chemical Society’s Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) is a leading organization in the storage and retrieval of chemical information. As such, CAS is in an excellent position to judge trends in development and commercialization of chemistry-related research. On June 24, 2010, CAS posted a research report titled, “China Takes Lead in the Commercialization of Bioethanol“. Although the number of journal articles on biofuels published in the U.S. is still tops, the number of patents filed is significantly larger in China.

Your students are probably interested in biofuels in general and bioethanol in particular. The CAS report divides biofuels into three generations: first, fuels derived from food sources such as corn; second, fuels derived from non-food sources such as cornstalks or grasses; and third, fuels derived from algae. Research on second generation biofuels has burgeoned during the past four or five years, with the number of research papers increasing by nearly six times and the number of patents increasing by more than 23 times.

This is an area that is ripe for discussion with students, both with respect to the research needed to develop first, second, and third generation biofuels and with respect to how research translates into commercial practice. This brief CAS report is an excellent source for the latter, but other resources will need to be considered for the former. A good one is listed below.

What Are Biofuels and How Much Do We Use?

Safety in science laboratories, especially chemistry laboratories, should always be a foremost concern. There is always more that can be done to assure that students in science laboratories, both research and teaching, can carry out experiments without accident. This week Chemical & Engineering News, the magazine that goes to all members of the American Chemical Society (ACS), has a cover story on chemical safety. The C&EN story highlights new emphasis on safety in the ACS Committee on Professional Training guidelines for curricula in undergraduate chemistry programs. The C&EN article should be required reading for everyone whose students do laboratory work.

A related article highlights a new textbook on chemical safety for students. If you are thinking about a course on chemical safety for students in research laboratories, you should definitely consider this book. Finally, think about the safety issues in any laboratories you are associated with. Do students or researchers in these laboratories know what to do in an emergency? Is information or training provided on a regular basis regarding safety and emergency issues? Is it clear to everyone that safety is a major concern and that preventive and emergency procedures must be known by everyone who works in the laboratory? What else might be done to enhance safety?Thinking about these things on a regular basis is important and in some cases will prevent major problems. More can always be done!

The Laboratory Safety Institute

Teaching Science: Lab Safety

Lab Safety Training Guide

How many of you have had students use the ideas of others inappropriately? Plagiarism has become easier on the Web and many people are not aware of what proper behavior is. A nice collection of online tools for detecting plagiarism is available at http://www.guidetoonlineschools.com/online-teaching/plagiarism#q. These will be useful if you have made clear to students your expectations regarding copying and pasting–and even if you have no–because they enable you to find instances of plagiarism in student work. Then it is up to you to decide what to do.

Do any of you readers have experience with whiteboards? If so, I would be interested in your comments on this article from the Washington Post.

http://bit.ly/9kSHRQ