Concepts, Content, Context: Assessment of a Strategic Redesign of a First-Year Chemistry Curriculum

First-year chemistry at UBC’s Okanagan campus serves as a prerequisite to later courses required of Chemistry, Environmental Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Biology majors, but is also a requirement BSc students who do not intend to proceed further in the chemical sciences. We are undertaking a multi-year strategic redesign, revision, and assessment of our first-year course sequence, with the overarching goal of identifying and pursuing learning outcomes relevant for all of our students regardless of their academic and career paths. Cognitive and affective learning outcomes were identified, followed by a mapping of concepts onto those objectives, design of a curriculum promoting those concepts, and a selection of active learning delivery methods appropriate to the sophistication of each concept. An integrated suite of active learning resources has been developed and implemented, including personal response system questions, in-class guided-inquiry assignments, flipped-class modules including interactive instructional videos, and a thematic framework demonstrating the broader societal applications of chemistry, designed to promote clearly articulate affective learning goals. This presentation will describe the pedagogical impetus for these changes, the detailed nature of the various learning activities, and the findings of an ongoing multi-faceted research study to assess the impacts of our redesign process, which include a dramatic increase in student success rates.