A proposal for providing general chemistry students with resources and instruction to help improve their math fluency has been awarded funding through the Provost’s Initiative on Teaching Advancement (PITA).
The proposal was submitted by Elise McCarren, director of the Chemistry Merit Program, and Jennifer McNeilly, director of the Math Merit Program. Their project, “Assessing and Improving Mathematics Fluency in Developmental General Chemistry,” was awarded a $10,000 PITA grant, which is designed to support faculty with the implementation of instructional and pedagogical innovation that has a high probability of enhancing education at Illinois.
McCarren said they have found that student success in first semester general chemistry courses, including Chemistry 101, is very closely related to whether or not students choose to stay in STEM majors. To help more students succeed in these courses, McCarren and McNeilly plan to focus on improving math skills of students, especially math skills often used in chemistry.
"Performance in math is very important to succeeding in chemistry, and students need to use some specific math skills over and over in our courses, such as estimation, conversions, using fractions, and reasoning with proportions. Though these may seem like basic concepts, a lot of students didn’t have much experience using these skills in a chemistry context during high school, and they aren’t specifically taught or practiced in our math classes," McCarren said.
Their approach will be to evaluate the math skills of Chem 101 students and create instructional materials and strategies to help them improve. This may include, for example, homework problems that students must complete without calculators to work on improving their “math intuition” related to chemistry or in-class discussion problems that are more open ended where students work with a group to share thoughts and come up with strategies.
"We will then measure their progress at the end of the semester to see if their math skills have improved and look at their confidence levels. The goal is to create a set of tools that other instructors can use in their classes which help students grow but don’t require a lot of extra time to be implemented," McCarren said. "Essentially, we will be using the class time and homework time that we already have in more intentional ways."
PITA grants are designed to support faculty with the implementation of instructional and pedagogical innovation that has a high probability of enhancing education at Illinois. The projects most likely to be funded are those that clearly align with campus educational goals, and where PITA award resources might be leveraged to increase external support.