By: Nicole Stone/Assistant News Director
“Chemistry, Life, the Universe and Everything” (CLUE) – this is the subject matter of Dr. Justin Carmel’s general chemistry course, and its curriculum aims to innovate the way students learn chemical concepts.
The National Science Foundation has granted Dr. Melanie Cooper, a developer of the CLUE curriculum funds to develop an organic chemistry CLUE curriculum and according to Carmel, Cooper is currently teaching a section at Michigan State University that follows a CLUE-like curriculum.
There is a biology curriculum counterpart to clue called Biological Fundamentals authored by both Cooper and Dr. Mike Klymkowsky, as well.
For now, a CLUE approach is in the works for organic chemistry and while only two sections of the CLUE curriculum is taught per semester at the University, Carmel hopes to see more sections open in the future as more professors come on board with CLUE.
“CLUE is trying to do is get to the crux of everything and it’s trying to look at what ideas are most central to science in general that we can actually then bring in and continue to talk about throughout biology and chemistry,” Carmel said.
Currently, the only two CLUE sequences at FIU are taught by Carmel and Underwood with Carmel teaching the “off” sequence of general chemistry 1 in the spring semester and underwood teaching the “on” sequence with general chemistry 1 in fall.
General chemistry 1 and 2 courses taught with the CLUE curriculum place a heavy emphasis on how and why things happen, according to Carmel, rather than equations or calculations.
“There’s a lot less math in our sections of the course but again, that’s because of the emphasis of the course. We’re not trying to teach you how to calculate until the cows come home, we’re trying to teach you to think about situations,” Carmel said.
Carmel said that what is really critical to the CLUE curriculum is its focus on fundamental concepts to provide the student with a firm and stable structure on which to stand in more advanced chemistry courses.
“If you can understand simple things about how two molecules might interact based on their structure, once you scale that up to things on the cell or the organ system, things start to make more sense – and it’s all based on that fundamental building block level of atoms, molecules, and how they interact,” Carmel said.
CLUE was developed by biologist Klymkowsky at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and chemist Cooper of Michigan State University. As of 2014, Carmel said, CLUE is the way all general chemistry courses are taught at Michigan State University. The curriculum only made its way to FIU a year ago in Jan. of 2017, according to Carmel.
CLUE was founded at FIU by Dr. Sonia Underwood, another chemistry education researcher at the University who completed her PhD with Cooper. Even though only two professors teach a full CLUE curriculum at the University, Carmel is hopeful that the numbers will grow.
Several other ongoing studies continue to explore CLUE’s effect on students. One graduate student at MSU in particular is examining how students understand and explain the process of salt dissolving.
At FIU in particular, research is being conducted about how students interpret intermolecular forces and if students can draw them and identify them.
CLUE at FIU, though, Carmel explained, is a bit different than CLUE at other universities.
MSU, for example, places about 400 students to a lecture hall, so the class is mostly lecture based, Carmel said. FIU’s smaller class size provides students with the opportunity to be constantly arranged in groups for group discussion. Of course, Carmel told Student Media, regardless of the university, the course content is the same.
Unlike other chemistry texts, the textbook for CLUE is more novel-like as well.
“It’s more of a narrative driver – its a story,” Carmel said.
Instead of practice problems, this chemistry “novel” provides readers with some questions to consider as they read.
As both a doctor of chemistry and a chemistry educator, Carmel described what he believes is a big contributor to student success in chemistry: focus.
“This is the big question. If I could figure this out, I should get the nobel prize in education,” Carmel said, laughing. “But really, it’s what you’re thinking about when you’re doing the learning. You have to have the focus and have to be really trying to connect and compare what you’re doing with the concepts you’ve learned in class.”
However, according to Carmel, students should be weary of studying such a microscopic subject with a microscopic view. Students should instead take a bird’s eye view approach and find connections, he said.
“Get away from the chemical facts, and minutiae, and equations and take a step back and say: okay, here’s the big picture of how things interact. Start to get at that.”
Featured image retrieved from Unsplash
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