New program encourages students to do 'actual science'

YOUNGSTOWN -- Students call them "cookbook labs" -- they learn to use lab equipment, complete an exercise and come up with a solution.
"Such labs efficiently help build skills in terms of working in a lab, but from a higher learning sense, the students haven't done any actual science at the end of the day," said Allen Hunter, professor of chemistry at Youngstown State University.
Getting first- and second-year undergraduate chemistry students to do "actual science" is the central goal of a new $3 million National Science Foundation-funded program at YSU and 14 other Ohio public universities and colleges.
"Today, graduate schools and employers are less and less looking only at the technical and book skills that students bring to them, but [they] also want people who can think on their feet, problem-solve and show higher-order thinking skills," Hunter said.
"The traditional model of education, and the traditional model of how we operate chemistry labs, especially at the freshman and sophomore levels, doesn't do that as well as we think it should. This new program will help us transform the labs so students not only learn the technical skills, but also learn to think and solve problems the ways that practicing scientists do."
YSU in lead role
The NSF grant will fund development of an Undergraduate Research Center by a consortium of Ohio universities -- with YSU in a lead role -- for an initiative called Research Experiences to Enhance Learning, or REEL.
Hunter, a co-principal investigator, said YSU has a strong national reputation for both research excellence in chemistry and chemical education and for combining teaching and research, so it was important to Ohio State University and the other doctoral-granting partner institutions that YSU be involved in the initiative.
Other partner universities include Akron, Cincinnati, Dayton, Toledo, Bowling Green, Central, Kent, Cleveland, Wright, Capital, Miami, Ohio and Columbus State Community College.
In addition to introducing research-driven labs in general chemistry classes, the initiative aims to generate new knowledge in the chemical sciences through faculty-student collaborative research, often on a statewide scale, and to increase graduation rates in STEM fields -- science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
According to REEL consortium, only about 20 percent of the nearly 40,000 students enrolled in STEM courses at the 15 partner institutions in 2001 will actually earn a degree in these fields.
Keeping undergrads
Hunter said that involving students in "discovery-oriented" lab projects early in their college careers could "help turn them on to the sciences, and then we'll keep them."
The universities will collaborate to develop chemistry classes that give students more control over their lab work, including actually choosing and defining their lab experiments and projects.
Projects at YSU will initially focus on ways to remove toxic elements from the next generation of paint pigments, which will result in publishable research at both the state and national levels.
The initiative calls for the new chemistry courses to be gradually worked into chemistry curricula statewide, with Ohio State introducing the first trial lab section in January. The concept will be first introduced at YSU in fall semester 2006, Hunter said.