Resumen de ConfChem Conference on Mathematics in Undergraduate Chemistry Instruction: Building Student Confidence with Chemistry Computation
I work in a liberal arts college as a chemistry professor. Not educated in the United States, I have been welcomed into my adopted culture by being given the opportunity to teach that has allowed me to learn about a system I knew little about beforehand. At the college level, chemistry can be portrayed as applied algebra. In my experience, a mastery of algebra rather than just a competence is needed for students to thrive in their learning of chemistry; anything less creates a barrier. The extent of this barrier appears to be exacerbated by the following factors: the lack of continuity of the offering of high school algebra and chemistry prior to entering college, the increased emphasis of attaining confidence at the cost of learning content at high school, and the numbers of students attaining access to college who do not know how to study. This paper looks at attempts to redevelop the robustness of students’ chemistry read-only memory (ROM): their ability to identify and apply appropriate computational methods to solve problems without much thinking or hesitation. With the confidence of a reliable ROM, students are better able to learn chemistry at college. This communication summarizes one of the invited papers to the ConfChem online conference on Mathematics in Undergraduate Chemistry Instruction, held from October 23 to November 27, 2017, and hosted by the ACS DivCHED Committee on Computers in Chemical Education (CCCE).
