Building an Online Community of Practice for the Evolution of Effective, Evidence-Based Teaching Practices: 15 Years of Improving Inorganic Chemistry Education

The Postsecondary Inorganic Chemistry Instructional Laboratory Curriculum: Results from a National Survey

“…Registered faculty member users (N = 1,467) of the Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Electronic Resource (VIPEr) 16 website and faculty members of the Division of Inorganic Chemistry of the American Chemical Society (N ≈ 6,000) were invited via email to complete the survey in October 2019; a reminder email was sent 2 weeks later (early November 2019). Data were collected anonymously without personally identifiable information.…”

“…Three-quarters of respondents developed their own laboratory experiments. Nearly 70% utilized the VIPEr website 16 as a laboratory experiment resource; we caution that this finding may be high due to our sampling strategy. Nevertheless, this reinforces the importance of the VIPEr website as an important repository of laboratory experiments.…”

“…Resources, such as this Journal and VIPEr, 16 continue to play an important role in designing and disseminating curricular materials that can easily be adapted to the various laboratory (and lecture) inorganic chemistry courses. However, the findings of our study are an opportunity for curriculum designers to provide guidance as to how parts of a laboratory experiment can be augmented or removed to suit the available resources and equipment in each instructional laboratory context.…”

“…[2][3][4]6,15 The results of this work provide an opportunity to consider how to further transform and improve the inorganic chemistry laboratory course and the broader undergraduate chemistry curriculum. Members of the Leadership Council of the Interactive Online Network of Inorganic Chemists (IONiC; of which multiple authors of this work are members) 16,17 are routinely asked "What should I be teaching in my instructional laboratory course?" While there is no single "correct" answer to that question, a descriptive account of the course, as it is enacted at a range of institutions, can provide valuable information for an instructor to make decisions when creating new laboratory courses or adding new laboratory experiments to an existing course.…”

“…We expect to observe in our study a variability in the inorganic chemistry instructional laboratory course curricula similar to that reported for the inorganic chemistry lecture course curriculum. − ,, The results of this work provide an opportunity to consider how to further transform and improve the inorganic chemistry laboratory course and the broader undergraduate chemistry curriculum. Members of the Leadership Council of the Interactive Online Network of Inorganic Chemists (IONiC; of which multiple authors of this work are members) , are routinely asked “What should I be teaching in my instructional laboratory course?” While there is no single “correct” answer to that question, a descriptive account of the course, as it is enacted at a range of institutions, can provide valuable information for an instructor to make decisions when creating new laboratory courses or adding new laboratory experiments to an existing course. Similarly, a descriptive account of the current course has the potential to inform organizations such as the American Chemical Society’s Committee on Professional Training when developing guidelines for degree programs and for departments considering revising their degree program curricula .…”