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The pipeline that spans from a gateway chemistry course to graduation needs replacing. Our incoming freshman class includes about 75 majors, and we graduate about 40 majors per year. As stark as these numbers are, roughly 50% of our graduating majors are transfer students. Transfer students are the new majority in higher education at many public institutions. UT Arlington, the University of Houston, and the University of North Texas rank 3rd, 5th, and 9th, respectively, in the nation for total transfer students per year.1 Therefore, less than one-third of our first-time, full-time freshman majors graduate with their initial intended degree. We are working on a radical alteration of our majors’ laboratory curriculum to increase retention rates, and this effort is guided by a goal to reinforce instruction by emphasizing the true nature of the science community.
The majority of undergraduate chemistry curricula are siloed into different subdisciplines (e.g., analytical, organic, physical, and so on) and feature expository (recipe-based) laboratory exercises. The former erects perceptible barriers between chemistry subdisciplines that fragments student learning and undermines the synergy that comes from the intimate overlap of the traditional subdisciplines. The latter is exclusively employed in large first- and second-year classes and teaches students to follow procedures and learn skills through practice, but it can lack stimulation. Laboratory students report focusing on how quickly they can finish an exercise rather than what they might learn. Recipe-based approaches are efficient to implement, but limit engagement with theory, reinforce many aspects of siloed coursework, and do not represent the true nature of science.
The Advanced Chemical Technologies (ACT) laboratory model has been designed to break down barriers and emphasize the ubiquitous interplay of synthesis and analysis throughout the chemistry discipline. At the current point in ACT’s development, chemistry majors (including biochemistry and biological chemistry) at the University of Texas Arlington no longer join in the traditional general, organic, and quantitative analysis laboratory courses. Instead, they are immersed from the outset in project-based and guided-inquiry laboratory experiences, where the central concepts of synthesis and analysis are emphasized together; the skills and thought processes performed by scientists are continually reinforced.
ACT has been designed as a four-year program, which focuses on the laboratory portion of the chemistry curriculum and culminates in a capstone research project. Besides a focus on breaking down siloes using non-expository laboratory exercises and encouraging learning through discovery, ACT also emphasizes the development of key skills deemed important by employers. These include critical thinking, teamwork, and presentation skills.
Student retention in the major is a key consideration. ACT uses both cross-semester projects and vertically integrated cohorts to ideally build a longitudinally linked community of practice. At the end of the first semester, students propose and design a three-week project they will execute at the beginning of the second semester. At the end of the first year, students design and propose, both written and orally, a two-semester-long research project they will carry out in the second year. As students progress into the second year, they share their research projects and progress with second-year students. As ACT students progress into the third year, they present their findings to the first-year students and begin to design their capstone project. Upper level students are given the opportunity to serve as undergraduate teaching assistants for new first-year students. As they progress further through the third year and into the fourth year, the idea is that students will be able to propose projects for second-year students that help advance their own capstone projects.
We envision that common threads of interest will develop around topics like new materials for environmental analytical chemistry, medicinal chemistry/chemical biology, chemical sensors, and chemical catalysis. These areas are already taking form, as we look toward beginning our third year of the ACT program. Thus, communities of practice can be naturally formed around loosely defined research interests. These communities become longitudinally linked as students from more advanced cohorts engage newer cohorts. Because of the collaborative nature of the projects, students build communities and learn a broad range of chemistry by collaborating with, presenting to, and discussing outcomes with their peers.
ACT is designed to encourage both formal and informal mentoring. Graduate student teaching assistants are tasked with guiding projects and inquiry. Experiments do not necessarily have known outcomes, and the graduate student must help guide students in designing experiments to answer scientific questions. Undergraduate research assistants get much the same experience as peer-teachers, and as they recruit small workforces for their own projects through presentations to more junior students. The chance to be a mentor or a mentee is afforded to and benefits all in the program.
Assessment in ACT happens primarily through student presentations, where they disseminate their efforts and findings on research projects. By the end of the first year, students have given a minimum of six 10-minute presentations. Additionally, they have written seven abstracts about the significance of different areas of science, made posts and discussion comments about science in society (through a LinkedIn group), and written two research proposals. With careful attention to content and by developing design and delivery skills, the advancement of presentation skills in this time frame by first year ACT students is nothing short of astounding. Throughout all, students are clearly engaged in learning about and researching topics for which they have shown interest and on which they propose to work.
Finally, one of the most universally favorable aspects of the program, as judged by ACT students, is a series of five external seminars each semester. Most of these feature industry professionals who describe their paths to their current jobs, what their current employers do, and what they do from day to day. From pharmaceuticals to energy, from start-ups to billion-dollar companies, and from lab researchers to venture capitalists, the main idea is to highlight the many ways students can use their degrees to build interesting careers. Many of the speakers we have had to date are program alumni. The intent is to bring these contacts back to interact with students at multiple points along their schooling, to help students develop their professional networks, find avenues for internships, and potentially provide new routes for financial support of ACT.
ACT is a radically different way to teach chemistry, but we are happy to find support for our interventions within the scientific education community. ACT emphasizes learning in the same way that chemistry generally is used in the real world – for discovery of new knowledge. While any new program requires refinement and iteration, initial outcomes and projections show that we can cut attrition by more than half. This will ultimately create a large increase in degrees conferred – an important metric of concern by many institutions of higher education, a major goal of the scientific community and relevant U.S. federal science agencies.
Kevin A. Schug is the Shimadzu Distinguished Professor of Analytical Chemistry and is a member of the University of Texas System Academy of Distinguished Teachers. Frank W. Foss, Jr. is an Associate Professor who teaches organic chemistry and is a 2018 winner of the University of Texas System Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award. Both Kevin and Frank are members of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Texas Arlington.
