This past week I once again had the privilege to attend the annual Geological Society of America meeting. This year it was held in Baltimore, MD. I presented a poster on Tuesday, in Session T81: Intentional Integration of Research into the Curriculum: Undergraduate Research as a Teaching Practice. My abstract was entitled "Embedding a semester-long analytical research project in water chemistry into an undergraduate geochemistry lab course".
For the past decade, I have worked to create a research project as a part of my undergraduate geochemistry class. The project focuses on collecting natural water samples and measuring the major dissolved inorganic chemical species. These include the total dissolved solids (TDS), and separately the four major cations (Ca+2, Mg+2, K+, Na+), anions (HCO3-, Cl-, SO4-2), silica (SiO2), and some nutrients (NO3-, NH4+). To do this, the students must learn a number of analytical techniques, including titration, gravimetric, and instrumental methods. This gives the students additional training in chemistry above the first year of General Chemistry that all geology majors take. I believe this is important: I wish I could get all of our majors to take a course in quantitative analysis, inorganic, or physical chemistry, but many of them choose not to.
My students spend the first half of the semester learning new chemical analytical techniques, praciticing on tap water (which here comes from the Kankakee River, the major river body in our drainage basin). Shortly after spring break when the ground has begun to thaw, we spend some time in the field collecting field data and collecting samples. We then spend the remainder of the semester applying the techniques learned to analyzing the water samples.
I want to highlight here just a few of the benefits of this research project.
In my poster, I chose to focus on the higher-order thinking skills that students gain as a part of this project. First, as they collect their data I require them to make every analysis three times, and report a mean and standard deviation. This simple task of repeating the analysis helps them to evaluate their own work. Sometimes their is a healthy competition that develops among them to see who can get that lowest standard deviation and generate the most consistent results. Second, the dataset they determine has some built-in checks for internal consistency, which again gives them an opportunity to critically evaluate their efforts, and consider sources of error. For example, they determine total dissolved solids by a gravimetric method as well as a sumation method after all of the major chemical species have been analyzed. They can also compare hardness titrations with Ca+2 + Mg+2 determined by AAS, and they can also determine total positive charge and total negative charge of their final solutions. Third, students begin to see themselves differently. They cease being students who learn about science, and start seeing themselves as scientists. This is an important internal transition in their development. In my experience, it is quite difficult to get students to each of these stages of self-awareness in more traditional laboratory experiences.
Finally, the materials and methods I use are very likely available at a large number of universities. The equipment we use is fairly common in chemistry departments, and everyone has a watershed.