Departmental Assessment Update - Natural Sciences Report

Department: Chemistry
Program:
Level: Undergraduate

1. List in detail your undergraduate Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) for each degree/certificate offered.

The chemistry department offers the BA and the BS degree in chemistry. The BS degree is certified by the American Chemical Society (ACS) by way of its Committee on Professional Training. This committee consists of academics and scientists from industry and reviews the department's response to a standardized questionnaire and supplementary information provided by the department.
    This degree certification ensures that graduates are exposed to a specified extent to certain core content, spend a sufficient number of semester hours in the laboratory and that the content of courses, the facilities and the laboratory environment meet professional standards.

We define the following learning outcomes for our undergraduate degree: At the end of their undergraduate education (upon graduation), students must
1.    be capable to reason qualitatively and quantitatively,
2.    be able to formulate a hypothesis and design experiments to test it,
3.    be able to make appropriate measurements, to record, reduce and analyze experimental data, and to formulate conclusions,
4.    be able to design workable syntheses of molecules of medium complexity on the basis of mechanistic reasoning,
5.    understand the forces that govern the chemical reactivity of atoms and molecules, their shape and their spectroscopic properties,
6.    be able to communicate orally and in writing their hypotheses, experimental approaches, results and conclusions.
7.    be able to work in a safe manner in the laboratory.

The individual course SLO's are more detailed.

2. Where are these SLOs published (e.g., department web page)?

3. Explain how your SLOs map onto your curriculum, i.e., how does your curriculum produce the specific SLOs in your students?

We are offering a one-year general chemistry sequence (CHEM 161/162) and the laboratories (CHEM 161L/162L), which is typical for chemistry departments across the country, and an accelerated one-semester Honors General Chemistry course (CHEM 181A) with lab. In these courses students are introduced to the various phases of matter and their transitions, the relation between the microscopic world of atoms and molecules to the macroscopic world. Here we develop qualitative and quantitative reasoning skills that are important for future scientists.
    In the second year all students take one year of Organic Chemistry with laboratories (CHEM 272/273 and CHEM 272L/273L). These courses build on material from General Chemistry and extend it to significant extent. As we discuss the arrangement of atoms in three-dimensional space and their reactions, we teach abstract reasoning and model building that allows the discussion of a specific phenomenon as a manifestation of a general pattern. A significant component of organic chemistry is the preparative aspect: chemistry is where you produce new compounds and materials. Thus the design of workable, mechanism-based synthetic sequences is an important aspect of these courses. In the laboratories we place heavy emphasis on the development of qualitative analytical and of preparative skills.
    Also in the second year we offer Analytical Chemistry (CHEM 274) and laboratory. This course teaches an important aspect of the training of a chemist: making meaningful measurements, error analysis and sampling strategies.
    This content is complemented in the third year in the course Instrumental Analysis (CHEM 333) with its laboratory. This course introduces students to the technological aspects of making precise and accurate measurements, how different instrument designs affect the measurement and how the instrumentation for a measurement needs to be chosen properly to answer the question under study. The CHEM 333L course bears a WI designation and heavily emphasizes written communication of core scientific content.
    In the third and/or fourth year of study students take Physical Chemistry (CHEM 351/352). These calculus-based courses heavily emphasize quantitative reasoning in the description of chemical change (thermodynamics) and for the fundamental description of atoms and molecules in quantum mechanics and spectroscopy.
    We regard CHEM 352L, the accompanying laboratory as the capstone course for the Physical Chemistry course content of our curriculum. Students have to demonstrate mastery of physical measurement concepts, data reduction and interpretation as well as presentation skills.
    CHEM 423 Synthesis: Inorganic Compounds and CHEM 443 Synthesis: Organic Compounds are combined into a one-semester capstone course in which we evaluate our students grasp core material in Inorganic and organic chemistry and their ability to integrate knowledge and skills they were exposed to earlier in the curriculum. As the course title suggests, both courses have a preparative emphasis. However, the characterization of the samples prepared by the students gets at least as much attention as the preparative work. Students are again using research-grade instrumentation in their experiments and are expected to operate it with supervision.

4. What specific methodologies were used to collect data? In developing your response, consider the following questions:

We are using CHEM 352L, CHEM 423 and CHEM 443 as Capstone courses to assess program effectiveness for our BS degree. These courses are usually taken in the last year before graduation and that appears to be the appropriate time and context to assess what our students pursuing a chemistry BS have learned.

    However, this assessment vehicle misses the BA students who usually do not enroll in CHEM 423/CHEM443 and does not capture at all the small number of students with a chemistry minor as they are not required to enroll in any of the courses designated capstone courses.
    At the present time this is an unsolved problem, however not one of major For Fall '06 registration we had prerequisite checking enabled and this gave me an opportunity to visit many departments' websites while looking for specific information. I was struck by how many departments require a certain grade to move from Freshman Chemistry to second year and from the first course of a two-semester sequence to the second. The chemistry faculty is very keen on instituting similar rules here. The general observation seems to be that students are tempted to go on to the second semester course of the one-year sequence, even though they only earned a D in the first course, and cannot keep up in the new course, thereby dragging down standards. Changing this situation at the UH as well will be an emphasis of the administrative changes we will be making to our courses this Fall semester.
    From a purely administrative point, our insistence that students pass a placement test before they can enter CHEM 161, the first semester of the one-year General Chemistry sequence, is a real burden: administer the exam to 600+ students, grade exams, enter  override codes manually etc. However, a quantitative evaluation of Pass/Fail rate for the exam and a study of the Pass/Fail rate for CHEM 161 and CHEM 162 before and after the exam was instituted suggests that pass rates in the chemistry courses have gone up since the placement exam was introduced. Thus we have decided to keep the exam in place.

Earlier this year we had to take an advanced organic course (CHEM 445) off the course list because we had not been able to offer it for years and have no reason to expect we will be able to do so soon. However, offering an Advanced Organic Chemistry course was one of the suggestions of our graduates. Such an offering might well be able to address some of the weaknesses we see in our CHEM 443 capstone course.
    In a similar vein, the biochemistry course offerings on campus are completely outdated with respect to content and shrinking in number. They are mostly directed at students with medical school aspirations and as a result have little chemistry in the biochemistry. I expect this to be an issue with our ongoing degree certification by the ACS. Although we have hired a bona fide biochemist, we need him right now to plug some holes in the existing program and can ill afford to have him offer a new course, however desirable this may be.

The survey of our graduates brought up other important points: the desirability of requiring that BS students enroll in directed research (CHEM 399), for instance.

Another problem area brought up was our Instrumental Analysis and Analytical Chemistry course offerings. This is a problem of long-standing concern to the faculty. In essence it is a resource problem: we have not had the positions to hire permanent faculty to take charge of these courses, and to develop them into courses that are up to date.
importance for our fledgling assessment efforts. We will return to this as we have capacity to deal with this aspect of the program.

    By way of the capstone courses we collect predominantly performance data and some informal feedback via discussion in small groups (attitudinal data). The latter are augmented by surveys of graduates after they have left the program and entered graduate school, medical school, and/or the job market. Participation is entirely voluntary, of course. We ask if our courses sufficiently prepared them for their chosen path.

    In exapnding our assessment efforts, we will institute this year a meeting between the Chair and the gradfuating seniors in order to get more feedback and from a larger cross section than we have been able to achieve by the survey. 

5. How were the assessment data/results used to inform decisions concerning the curriculum and administration of the program?

For Fall '06 registration we had prerequisite checking enabled and this gave me an opportunity to visit many departments' websites while looking for specific information. I was struck by how many departments require a certain grade to move from Freshman Chemistry to second year and from the first course of a two-semester sequence to the second. The chemistry faculty is very keen on instituting similar rules here. The general observation seems to be that students are tempted to go on to the second semester course of the one-year sequence, even though they only earned a D in the first course, and cannot keep up in the new course, thereby dragging down standards. Changing this situation at the UH as well, will be an emphasis of the administrative changes we will be making to our courses this Fall semester.
    From a purely administrative point, our insistence that students pass a placement test before they can enter CHEM 161, the first semester of the one-year General Chemistry sequence, is a real burden: administer the exam to 600+ students, grade exams, enter  override codes manually etc. However, a quantitative evaluation of Pass/Fail rate for the exam and a study of the Pass/Fail rate for CHEM 161 and CHEM 162 before and after the exam was instituted suggests that pass rates in the chemistry courses have gone up since the placement exam was introduced. Thus we have decided to keep the exam in place.

Earlier this year we had to take an advanced organic course (CHEM 445) off the course list because we had not been able to offer it for years and have no reason to expect we will be able to do so soon. However, offering an Advanced Organic Chemistry course was one of the suggestions of our graduates. Such an offering might well be able to address some of the weaknesses we see in our CHEM 443 capstone course.
    In a similar vein, the biochemistry course offerings on campus are completely outdated with respect to content and shrinking in number. They are mostly directed at students with medical school aspirations and as a result have little chemistry in the biochemistry. I expect this to be an issue with our ongoing degree certification by the ACS. Although we have hired a bona fide biochemist, we need him right now to plug some holes in the existing program and can ill afford to have him offer a new course, however desirable this may be.

The survey of our graduates brought up other important points: the desirability of requiring that BS students enroll in directed research (CHEM 399), for instance, as many graduate programs on the mainland prefer applicants with research experience. This topic is a matter of ongoing discussion in the faculty.

Another problem area brought up in tyhe survey of our graduates was our Instrumental Analysis and Analytical Chemistry course offerings. This is a problem of long-standing concern to the faculty. In essence it is a resource problem: we have not had the positions to hire permanent faculty to take charge of these courses, and to develop them into courses that are up to date.