Electronic quizzes vivify 8 a.m. chem classes

Marrying general chemistry and Who Wants to be an Millionaire is working for James A. Wingrave, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UD.

Freshmen hold electronic push pads that allow them to buzz in when they compute the answers to the quizzes Wingrave and instructor Marybeth Kramer give.

For Bryan Curley, an honors student from Norfolk, Mass., getting used to the technology has been tricky, he said, but the push pads accomplish their goal--they provide an extra incentive to attend the early morning class because the electronic points count as 5 percent of the semester grade.

“I believe that, come the end of the semester, there will be a noticeable improvement in the students’ grades because the electronic quizzes do help to wake up the sleepy 8 a.m. classes,” Curley said. “Students try much harder, in my opinion, to stay awake and attentive because they know that if they fall asleep then they have a difficult time answering the questions that appear on the electronic quizzes.”

The quizzes are just one item in a basket of innovations Wingrave uses to make chemistry more approachable for freshmen. He has been retooling introductory chemistry courses for about five years, trying to assure campus newcomers don’t go astray in the first semester. “Chemistry is a hard course,’’ he said. “If people think it’s going to be drudgery, it turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Wingrave hasn’t jettisoned the normal lecture-and-lab pattern, but he’s added new elements. One is the student-led collaborative learning workshop. “It’s one of those slap-your-forehead kind of things that we should have known all along--students learn better from each other than from professors or teaching assistants or anybody else,” he said.
“We all know there are a number of ways to learn.”

Wingrave incorporates electronic homework that counts for 5 percent of the grade, computer quizzes also at 5 percent and 5 more percent gleaned from the collaborative workshops.

Junior Frederick Tibuah uses his push pad to log into the electronic chemistry quiz.

The bulk of the course grade is still rooted in traditional exams, labs and the final, but the recent additions seem to offer something for everyone. Wingrave said loners like the electronic homework, collaborative students like the workshops and techies prefer the buzz-in quizzes.

The point of all three is to get students involved in working problems from the outset. “The more problems you work, the better off you are. Ideally, you’d work every problem in the universe and you’d never be surprised on a test, but that’s not the way it works,” Wingrave said.

He keeps tailoring the course to fit the students. When he realized students were copying prelab exercises, he asked Bridget A. Brennan, a research assistant in the School of Education, to suggest changes. Together, they formulated prelabs that require each student to write his or her own procedure.

“The idea of all this is to make learning more fun and less onerous and to make the transition form high school to college easier,” Wingrave said. “These are science majors. They know they need to study chemistry, and, when they don’t study enough, it’s not because they’re blowing if off. It’s because they have so much other coursework that they just get hamstrung on work. They try to catch up, but, at the end of the semester, it’s like trying to steer the Titanic to change your grade a lot.”

Wingrave also uses other computerized tools in class, too, but there is one student-pleasing addition that isn’t likely to be on the horizon.

“No prizes for the quizzes,’’ he said. “We haven’t come up with a sponsor yet who wants to give us $1 million.”

Article by Kathy Canavan
Photos by Kathy F. Atkinson

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