Today's chemistry student is different from the student of 75 years ago, and educators have responded

The entry of different kinds of students into chemistry over the past 75 years has produced both opportunities and challenges for educators and students at all levels. Changing national priorities and increasing college attendance have led to an influx of students with expectations and attitudes sometimes radically different from those of their professors. The changing student population has led to different approaches to teaching chemistry, controversy about doctoral training, the growth of interest in how students learn best, and for some, an almost wistful longing for the good old days.

There are more students in college chemistry today, but only about 3% of students who take a general chemistry course end up majoring in chemistry. Today, chemistry students in the U.S. are not all-nor even predominantly- male, they are not all between 18 and 22, they are not all middle class, they are not all white, and they are not all American.

Many college chemistry students are typical independent Generation-Xers, people who are energized and motivated by completing projects-like chemistry classes or bachelor's degrees-yet are restless and impatient in class. They are savvy consumers of education and look to their professors to serve them. Many have a very clear idea of where they want to be when they get out of college, and they don't want to have to deal with any extraneous details. They want the relevance of their studies to be made clear up front.

Depending on who is talking, teaching these nontraditional-as well as the more traditional-students is challenging, exciting, frustrating, uplifting, or depressing. "All of these things make for a very, very interesting fabric of the profession," says Derrick Tabor, professor of chemistry at Johnson C. Smith College in Charlotte, N.C. "The only constant that there's ever going to be is continual change." Perhaps, it's the only constant there ever has been.

Early this century
By the turn of the 20th century, the education of Ph.D. chemists through research was well established. Modern research laboratories became the training grounds for doctoral-level chemists in the U.S. starting in the 1870s. In 1876, Ira Remsen established the most well-known of these chemistry labs at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. These and the other academic labs that soon followed became the major source of the nation's scientific leadership in the early 20th century.

These laboratories were dedicated to the pursuit of pure scientific knowledge untainted by concerns about industrial applications or profits. Remsen himself was a champion of the pursuit of scientific knowledge for its own sake and was known to stress the "morally uplifting value of graduate education." To Remsen and many of his contemporaries, pure science was the key to understanding nature, the model for all forms of learning, for civilized behavior, and for human progress.

But his graduates and their graduates were well trained in research and began to make discoveries that could be commercialized. So it was only natural that they became very much in demand by a rapidly growing U.S. chemical industry.

In the early 1920s as today, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry News Edition, the predecessor to Chemical & Engineering News, was reading the pulse of the chemistry community-academic and industrial. Its pages frequently featured lively commentary and letters discussing the appropriate nature of chemistry study and of who was and who was not qualified to call themselves a chemist. Already, there was some tension in the air.

"A degree is like a patent of nobility," read a 1923 letter to the editor. "And those who have one resent the entrance of some plebeian upstart into their class." Nevertheless, enter they did. Increasing numbers of students began to look toward the chemical industry as a place to pursue their futures, support their families, and maybe make enough money to be comfortable.

Some of the 1920s' old guard found this pragmatism a bit wrongly focused. And some invoked as ideal an image of a worshipful student who stayed in school, getting all of the degrees he could get." The three years of study at the feet of a master ... cannot be replaced with twice that time spent working in an industrial laboratory," argued another correspondent in a 1923 letter to the editor of I&EC News Edition.

The writer continued, "Many a man can work out his own salvation without help, but let us keep our science of chemistry on a high plane." Then he added: "I have always felt that there are too many self-made and half-baked chemists, so called, on the market today. ... Encourage the young men to get all the degrees they can before they begin work if we wish to make any real advances in chemistry."

But some just wanted to get on with their lives, as relayed by chemist E. Randolph Fawcett, in a commentary in a 1924 issue of the magazine. He wrote:

"Recently a discussion among a group of high school boys as to the college courses they expected to take, in preparation for their life work, proved not only interesting but enlightening. The majority were planning on some form of engineering. One lad finally said, ÔNo, not for me. Commerce, business, law, psychology. Four years in college is long enough. Then two years and get married with a home of my own.'

"This [response] was so unusual that I asked for his reasons," Fawcett continued. "The student replied, ÔMy cousin took a complete course in chemistry, seven years, and found that in spite of all that training, he had to begin at the bottom and work up. It will be years before he will be able to support a family and a flivver [an automobile].' "

Fawcett pressed on, "Isn't that true of any profession?" The boy replied, "In a way, yes, but in chemistry you have to wait for the old ones to die before you get anything worthwhile. Even then the businessman is far ahead."

During the years following World War I, the chemical community, led by the members of the American Chemical Society, launched a public outreach campaign to convince the country to support chemistry. And students eager to enter the burgeoning dyestuffs and pharmaceutical industries flocked to chemistry in droves.

New knowledge in the areas of chemical bonding and thermodynamics forced students to get a broad background in foreign languages, physics, and mathematics to keep up in class. In addition, big lecture-hall demonstrations were giving way to extensive laboratory work. Students were becoming more personally involved in the hands-on aspects of chemistry earlier on in their education.

This increased demand for chemistry courses resulted in dramatic growth in university chemical engineering laboratories. In addition, chemical education itself began to be an area of increasing interest. Several ACS programs of very long standing have their roots in the years between World War I and World War II.

In 1924, the Section of Chemical Education of ACS started the Journal of Chemical Education as a source of information for chemistry teachers across the country. In 1936, the ACS Committee for Accrediting Educational Institutions (now called the Committee on Professional Training) developed, for the first time, minimum standards for the chemistry curriculum. The next year, 1937, ACS started its student affiliates program, the preprofessional program for undergraduates, to encourage and support students in their pursuit of a chemistry education.

Postwar years
The return of veterans after World War II and the G.I. Bill created a tremendous rush of students into universities. Although he was still in college at the time, Washington State University chemistry professor Glenn A. Crosby watched what happened when that bulge of students came through the colleges and then went to graduate school. "Graduate schools suddenly exploded with people," he says. "There was a huge enrollment. As a result, the requirements for going to graduate school were very high. You had to have very top grades, top everything," he recalls.

In addition, after World War II, there was a profound shift of the U.S. economy from traditional industry into one that would build its future on sophisticated exploitation of advanced scientific knowledge. The biggest acceleration in this shift came from the military preparedness effort, which was thrust into even higher gear after the Soviet launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957.

A lot was at stake. Faith in science, the nation's security concerns, and competition with the Soviet Union blended scientific pursuit with patriotism. And the government was supporting science in a big way. Passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958, for example, was a direct response to the Soviet Sputnik launches and resulted in a surge of government funding for graduate students and university research.

"When I went to college, I didn't know what I wanted to be. I loved science and I had this yen to learn things," says Crosby. "When a professor walked up in front of the class and started lecturing, he was on a pedestal to me. I wanted to know more or at least as much as that person. They had Ph.D. degrees, and I admired what they had achieved.

"That was the culture of those of us who sat in the classroom," he explains." We had a certain amount of reverence, a certain amount of respect that we gave those people who had Ph.D.s and knew a great deal more than we did, and we wanted to get that."

The attitudes of chemistry students, like all people, reflect the society of the time. "By the end of World War II, we believed everything the politicians told us," explains Diane Bunce, chemical education researcher and professor at Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. "We believed everything we heard on the radio, and then eventually everything we saw on TV." It wasn't until some years later that the wholesale questioning of U.S. institutions got under way.

California State University, Los Angeles, chemistry professor Stanley Pine agrees. "In the 1950s, our society was much clearer. It was very clear to everybody about what they needed to do to get where they wanted to go. Now our society is much less clear, which means that students are much less secure."

The late 1960s and early '70s were transforming and traumatic for American society. The Vietnam War; the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy; the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; the killing of students by National Guard soldiers at Kent State University; and the break-in at the Watergate that resulted in the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon, to name just a few wounds the country endured, threw the whole fabric of society into question. Students played an active role in much of the social change and began to demand more freedom.

Simultaneously, student preparation for college chemistry began to fall off." You could see that happening," says Crosby. "The students' abilities in simple arithmetic were falling. We have never really recovered."

On a chemical arithmetic exam administered to all students entering Washington State University, the performance of the students fell 16% in the five years between 1969 and 1974, whereas the grade point average of the incoming freshmen had increased 5% over the same period.

"I saw that happening," Crosby says," and, while I don't know what caused it, part of it had to do with more students coming into the university. But I don't think that's all of it. I think there was a cultural change in the high school and there was more grade inflation."

Crosby and many others believe that the decline in student preparation continues today. He thinks that part of the reason may be that high school teachers are underprepared. But even that doesn't tell the whole story.

"Over the years since the 1970s," chemist J. Ivan Legg, provost at the University of Memphis, says, "we've learned that the issue is much more complex than just teacher preparation. The student mix we get now is much different than the student mix in the 1950s. In the 1960s, we started drawing students in large numbers from economically disadvantaged communities. And as a result, we were getting students who were even more poorly prepared. And yet we were compelled to recognize that we had a much broader citizenship than the traditional one we had before, and we had to do something about it."

Different learners mean different learning styles and different backgrounds. "It used to be that with almost anyone who was taking physical chemistry, you could count on a good grounding in calculus, in organic chemistry. Now, you can't count on anything," says Crosby. And it seems neither can students, not even those earning Ph.D.s.

Ph.D. education
The traditional model of graduate education at the doctoral level, organized around an intensive research experience, has been the mode of education of Ph.D. chemists since Remsen's time and has served as a world pattern for the advanced training of scientists and engineers.

It came about during a time of growing industrial demand for research, and it was strengthened by the national security demands of the Cold War. In addition to security concerns, domestic and global priorities, such as human health and environmental protection, have resulted in a highly developed research infrastructure that has as one of its primary components the education of graduate students.

Demand for scientists and engineers has remained strong compared with other fields, but there has been a marked reduction in demand for traditional academic researchers. This employment situation has already contributed to a frustration of expectations among newly minted Ph.D.s. In addition, major industrial sectors also have reassessed their needs and reshaped their research, development, and business strategies.

Meanwhile, opinion about what constitutes the appropriate education of Ph.D.s has varied over the years. And the rapidly growing body of chemistry knowledge has made specialization by many Ph.D.s perhaps inevitable, but also worrisome.

"Time was when individual chemists were broadly aware of the developments over the whole of the science," wrote Lord Todd, newly elected president of the International Union of Pure & Applied Chemistry in the Aug. 5, 1963, issue of C&EN. "True, the division of chemistry into organic, inorganic, physical, and analytical sections is of very long standing, but specialists in any one of these used to be on familiar terms with the others.

"But that time has long passed," he wrote, "thanks mainly to the explosive growth of our science during the past 50 years and the fantastic increase in factual knowledge that has accompanied it. The practitioners of the various branches have drawn more and more apart with the passage of time, and only a few years ago, the average organic chemist's knowledge and familiarity with, say, physical chemistry effectively terminated at the undergraduate level."

Concern about the career prospects of these specialized Ph.D. students led the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Science, Education & Public Policy in 1995 to issue a report, "Reshaping the Graduate Education of Scientists and Engineers." The report says that doctoral programs in science and engineering in the U.S. should better prepare students for careers outside academe. In other words, Ph.D. programs should strive to increase a student's versatility rather than focusing so much attention on narrow areas of specialization.

The report used data collected by the National Science Foundation to compare cohorts of scientists and engineers five to eight years after receipt of a Ph.D. degree (that is, after most of them have completed a period of postdoctoral study). More than half the 1969-72 science and engineering Ph.D.s were employed in universities in 1977, compared with less than 43% of the 1983-86 Ph.D.s in 1991. Only 26% of Ph.D. scientists and engineers were employed in business and industry in 1973, compared with 34% in 1991.

Data for a similar cohort of chemistry Ph.D.s indicate 32.1% were in academe in 1977 compared with only 21.2% in 1991. In government in 1977, about 6% of Ph.D. chemists were civilian employees of the federal government five to eight years after receiving a Ph.D. degree; in 1991, that number had dropped to 2.4%. Business and industrial employment for chemists has increased for that post-Ph.D.-degree period. In 1977, 45.5% were employed in industry; in 1991, 60.9% were.

Those long-term trends led the academy committee to conclude that "Ph.D.s are increasingly finding employment outside universities, and more and more are in types of positions that they had not expected to occupy."

In addition, "employers do not feel that the current level of education is sufficient in providing skills and abilities to the people they are interested in employing, particularly in communication skills (including teaching and mentoring abilities for academic positions); appreciation for applied problems (particularly in an industrial setting); and teamwork (especially in interdisciplinary settings)," the report says.

"Over the past 10 years, I believe that Ph.D. preparation has changed," said James D. Burke, manager of research recruiting and university relations for Rohm and Haas, Spring House, Pa., in the May 29, 1995, issue of C&EN. "Savage competition for funding and the need to produce almost immediate results has driven this change. As a result, students seem less curious than before because they have been made to become focused early. I don't see the situation changing much in the near future."

Needless to say, a number of conferences and task forces over the years have tried to determine what elements constitute the essence of the best Ph.D. education. In 1995, then-ACS President-elect Ronald Breslow, chemistry professor at Columbia University, hosted one such conference. Conferees from industry described qualities they found most valuable in prospective employees, and participants from graduate programs described their concerns. What emerged, according to Breslow, was a "remarkable agreement on what doctoral education in chemistry should accomplish and how its goals might be achieved." Achieving a balance between mastery of a specific area of chemistry and gaining educational breadth was listed as the first and, perhaps most essential, quality of the best doctoral education.

In a 1996 follow-up ACS Comment column in C&EN, Breslow concluded:" We all understand the importance of research and want to minimize interference with it. However, we are educating Ph.D. students for lifetime careers and must see that their education gives them all the skills they need."

Course content evolves
As long as there has been chemical education, some teachers have been looking for ways to make science more relevant to their students. And, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on where you are, teaching methods and subject matter have changed.

An analysis of textbook contents published in a 1924 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education shows that McPherson & Henderson, the most commonly used college text at the time, consisted mostly of descriptive chemistry, frequently boiling down to lists of reactions to memorize. It was probably dull. However, a certain amount of drudgery-like a dose of cod liver oil before bed-was considered "good for you."

"A technical student's training is no bed of roses," warned C. A. Brautlecht of the University of Maine, Orono, in a commentary published in a 1923 issue of I&EC News Edition. "College men who have succeeded usually admit that some of their college work which was most helpful in developing their reasoning ability was work which was not pleasant while they were doing it. ... To stay with the lead ... often requires tact and good judgment on the part of the student. He cannot waste his energy in riotous living and have enough left for the hard courses."

Although he certainly did not advocate "riotous living," Herbert R. Smith, a chemistry teacher at Lake View High School, Chicago, in an article in the January 1924 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education asserted that, "Education can be made more attractive and still be dignified. It is not at all necessary to cater to the whims of pupils, but if teaching is to be effective, it must be taught in terms of the subject's service to mankind."

He explained, "Without contact with life, the subject becomes dead to the pupil, and so far as the subject of chemistry is unattractive in the high school, just so far it is taught in a bookish, useless way. The pursuit of chemistry involves just as much daring as any adventure, and its quest as many thrills as any Sherlock Holmes ever discovered."

Textbooks, however, changed very little over the next 40 years. And increasing ripples of dissatisfaction with out-of-date curricula felt by Smith in the 1920s reached a crescendo of self-criticism after Sputnik. The atmosphere of the Cold War provided a splendid opportunity for the wholesale revision of the curriculum, noted J. S. F. Pode of Eton College, Windsor, England, in a retrospective published in the February 1966 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education.

What was wrong with traditional chemistry courses? "Well," wrote Pode," the courses were too large, built up by a process of accretion, and impossible to finish without a terrible rush." Courses were too factual, and "textbooks had become unreadable encyclopedias of 'essential information.'" Educators also moaned that laboratory work was almost always a tepid demonstration of what the student knew already.

To ramp up the production of scientists, considered necessary to national security during the Cold War, students needed to be drawn into science in high school. So, much effort was spent on revising the high school curriculum. Two fundamental themes that ran through the design of new high school science courses-notably the Chemical Bond Approach (1959) and the Chemical Education Material Study (CHEM Study) courses (1963)-were the continuous development of a limited number of integrative themes combined with the spirit of inquiry-not just memorizing laundry lists of reactions.

The new courses were scientifically and mathematically rigorous. The topics covered in both courses were stoichiometry, atomicity, kinetic-molecular theory, periodicity, energy, rates of reaction, equilibrium, bonding, and acids and bases. The fundamental approach of both curricula was the same-the atom is treated as a unit of structure. "Emphasis in both courses is firmly laid on chemical principles rather than on descriptive chemistry," noted Pode.

Curriculum development is supported by NSF even today, and more and more it is bolstered by research into how people learn chemistry. According to Bunce, chemical education research as a discipline started gaining steam about 25 years ago. "In chemical education, changes that are focused on the student are now based on the theory of learning by constructivism that says that the student is the focus of the learning, not the professor," says Bunce. "It used to be we talked about the teacher being the 'sage on the stage'; now the teacher is more the 'guide on the side.' "

Bunce was involved with the team that in 1988 wrote "Chemistry in the Community"-or more familiarly, ChemCom, the ACS chemistry course for 10th- and 11th-grade college-bound students. The student-centered pedagogy of ChemCom was groundbreaking. It is now the text used in nearly one in five high school chemistry classes in the U.S. ChemCom paved the way for a growing group of textbooks in chemistry as well as in other disciplines that use a contextual approach to teaching and learning.

NSF is currently funding development of a web-based high school chemistry course called ChemQuest that combines a context-based, student-centered approach to learning chemistry with heavy reliance on computers. ChemQuest is a full-year introductory chemistry course that uses the computer to reconceptualize the learning environment in a highly interactive and inquiry-based design model guided by the new science education standards.

In ChemQuest, the computer has essentially replaced the textbook. All the instruction is on the computer, and students spend about 30 to 40% of their time at computer terminals. The rest of the time they do lab experiments, have discussions, and work on worksheets.

"This is basically college-prep chemistry," says ChemQuest developer Loretta L. Jones of the University of Northern Colorado, Greeley. "But instead of going to class and listening and writing things down and then going home and studying and taking the test, students now come in and have a challenge," she says.

For example, students are presented with a town with water that needs to be purified, and they have to figure out how to purify it. "There is an environmental context in every lesson, and students can either start from the environmental context and then get into the chemistry or dive right into the chemistry," says Jones.

In addition, ChemQuest is adaptable to three different levels of instruction." In a way, ChemQuest allows students to custom design their own curriculum." Jones says that the course is flexible in such a way that the faster students are not held back by the slower students.

"In many respects, new context-based approaches to teaching chemistry could be considered more rigorous than a traditional chemistry course," says Pine." We're not asking the students to memorize some simple irrelevant fact anymore; we're asking them to see how this science fits into a social setting."

Different students
"It used to be that chemistry classes were much more standardized in terms of who was in the audience as well as their backgrounds," says Tabor. "Students' capabilities and their potentials were defined in terms that everybody could agree on. Students either fit or didn't fit some kind of standard mold of what a scientist was supposed to be.

"Now," he says, "we've had to question our assumptions, because ... the students don't necessarily look like their professors. They don't necessarily come from the same background as their professors. Nor do they study or have the same motivations as their professors. Now the faculty member is challenged with a new type of student."

"Until the late 1960s, higher education was revered, and no one asked a thing about whether we were doing our job or not. No one ever worried about it," says Legg. "There was a whole portion of society that we didn't have to deal with. The economically deprived part of our society was just not part of our agenda in those days. And then we had the Vietnam protests. These protests changed the perception of the universities forever."

Today's students are demanding relevance. They are skeptical and not necessarily in awe of their professors. But skepticism lends itself to scientific pursuit, and diversity almost inevitably leads to creativity.

Legg says: "In any endeavor, you're going to struggle a bit, and the struggle is part of growing. Our diversity is both our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. What makes us as creative as we are is our diversity. This is a rich but difficult field that we have to plow. I'm optimistic, but I think we have some very rough times ahead."