Lock Haven Faculty Share Expertise at Conference on Chemical Education

FROM LEFT: DR. JACQUELINE DUMM, DR. BRENT MAY AND DR. KEVIN RANGE

Three faculty members from Lock Haven, a Commonwealth University, Drs. Jacqueline Dumm, Brent May, and Kevin Range, shared their chemical education expertise at the 2022 Biennial Conference on Chemical Education held earlier this year.

“The Biennial Conference on Chemical Education provides opportunities to share pedagogical ideas with colleagues from around the world and to learn how to use their ideas to improve our curriculum,” May said.

“I was excited to be able to share the activities my colleagues from the Molecular Computation and Visualization in Undergraduate Education (MoleCVUE) group have developed to a national audience of chemical educators,” Range said. “The activity I developed using electronic structure calculations to have students explore the electron configurations of atoms and ions was particularly well received.”

“BCCE was the ideal setting to share my sabbatical project, which involved writing an instructional manual for students on how to present chemical demonstrations and creating a video series to accompany the demos,” Dumm said. “I made new connections with scientists from across the country and received constructive feedback on the project.”

Range said he has already implemented some of the ideas learned at the conference into his classroom. “I was pleased to be able to spend some time learning about specifications grading systems and have started employing it in some of my courses,” Range said. “The conference was a great opportunity to share my expertise with other chemical educators and to learn things from them to enhance my pedagogy.”

Dumm presented “Undergraduate Instructional Resources for Performance of Chemical Demonstrations” as part of the “Community-Based Learning in Chemistry: Implementation, Best Practices, and Evaluation” symposium.

May presented “Using R in the Physical Chemistry Laboratory,” co-authored with Range, as part of the “Engaging Students in Physical Chemistry” symposium.

Range presented “Exploring electron configurations of atoms and ions with WebMO and Gaussian” as part of the “Computational Chemistry in the Classroom” symposium and “Analyzing infrared and NMR spectra of organic molecules with WebMO and Gaussian” as part of the “Using Computational Chemistry to Improve Student Understanding of Chemical Reactions” symposium.

Range also served as a facilitator at the “Computational Chemistry in the Classroom” workshop.

“These types of professional opportunities are integral to the academic experience. I commend our faculty for their engagement and commitment to enhancing the learning experience for CommonwealthU students,” said Bashar W. Hanna, president.

The national meeting, sponsored by the Division of Chemical Education of the American Chemical Society, was held at Purdue University.