Resumen de A Poster Session in Organic Chemistry That Markedly Enhanced Student Learning
Chemistry courses worldwide have experienced dwindling student numbers and decreasing success rates in recent years. This has led to many proposals on ways to get students actively involved in their courses. At the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, our ChemII course has suffered a similar fate and the introduction of cooperative small group tutorials to get students actively involved in the learning process has met with limited success. Further innovations were introduced into the Organic II module, but students' perception of the module remained negative and their commitment to it has dwindled over the years. In the first semester of 1998 the ChemII class at Wits performed particularly poorly and only 23% of the students passed. In an attempt to improve this situation in the second semester, a poster presentation session was introduced into the Organic II module. The choice of topic for the poster was found to be crucial to the success of the innovation, which resulted in students' increased enthusiasm for, commitment to, and understanding of organic chemistry. Relative to the previous year, the class average for the Organic II module increased by 10% and the pass rate by 30% while the class average and pass rates in the other three ChemII modules (inorganic, analytical and physical) dropped by comparable amounts. This improvement in performance in the Organic II module is credited to the poster presentations shifting most students from a "futile learning cycle" into a "productive" one.
