Conference Paper
Miha Lee
Living by Chemistry
Table of Figures
Figure 1 Six units of LBC .............................................................................................. 3
Figure 2 The result from the leactures ........................................................................ 5
Figure 3 Children's ideas about love ............................................................................ 6
Figure 4 The new result from the discussions ............................................................ 7
Figure 5 Copper Cycle .................................................................................................. 8
Figure 6 Creating the periodic table ............................................................................. 9
Figure 7 Variables ....................................................................................................... 10
Figure 8 Scale .............................................................................................................. 11
Figure 9 A Sample Questions ...................................................................................... 12
Figure 10 The Result of the Assessment ................................................................... 13
Figure 11 Map of Learning Gains ............................................................................... 14
Name: California Science Education Conference held by CSTA
Date & venue: October. 19~22. 2006, Civic center auditorium, San Francisco, CA
I went to San Francisco on 19, October and left there on 21, October, attending many
demonstrations, the exhibition and a focused speech. The first thing that attracted my
attention when I checked the schedule of the conference was ‘Teaching Chemistry with
Cutting-Edge Software series’ because in my opinion the visualization of molecular world
would help students understand chemical concepts and principles. Thus, I attended the
demonstrations focused on the Power of Molecular Visualization, and I learned about
Odyssey Program, which is a simulation program based on real scientific data. It was
amazing to see various types of modules showing electron density around molecules and
gas molecules moving so fast depending on temperature and pressure. However, it was not
what I had expected that would show how we science teachers use the technology for the
specific didactic purposes.
In addition, I participated in other programs such as ‘Explore the STC program:
properties of matter’. After joining many programs and events, I realized why Professor
Rivas asked me to attend a conference. It’s because as a teacher I need to catch up with
new pedagogical methods and materials to renew my teaching. I have also learned that I
need to beware of many commercial programs promoting their products.
The most impressive program I attended was the focused speech named as ‘Living by
Chemistry: Enhancing learning Gains for All Students’ presented by Angelica Stacy, the
chemistry professor of UC, Berkeley. She talked about teaching chemistry for promoting
understanding of big ideas of chemistry for all students with PowerPoint’s presentation.
She didn’t give the audience hand-outs, so I took the photos of her presentation, which can
be found at my website. (Lee, 2006) Besides, I took a note of her lecture, but I thought it’s
not enough. Hence, I looked up the Internet to get more detailed information. The following
is a paper I made based on my note and Internet materials that are relevant to her research.
What is Living By Chemistry?
Living By Chemistry is a full year high school chemistry curriculum project designed to
make high school chemistry more accessible to a diverse pool of students without
sacrificing content. Stacy said, “This is important because chemistry is a gateway to almost
all the health professions, I want to open that gate to more students.” I totally agree on this
idea because most of my students are living in unprivileged neighborhoods and I want to
provide them with a better opportunity to get a good job in the future by making my
chemistry teaching more helpful to them. Consequently, the improvement of student
learning is my goal of teaching chemistry. Living By Chemistry is a unit-based,
collaborative curriculum that takes up the student-centered approach. So if I study about
this curriculum more, I will acquire a lot of useful information for my teaching.
The curriculum is organized around the big ideas of chemistry in order to promote
subject matter coherence for students. The entire curriculum consists of six units: alchemy,
smells, weather, toxins, fire, and show time, each of which has a contextual theme to help
understanding of the chemistry being taught. (Figure 1) The context provides a real world
foundation for the chemistry concepts and serves to hold the interest of the students.
Figure 1 Six units of LBC
In addition, the Living By Chemistry curriculum is unique in providing more thorough
guidance to teachers by offering daily lessons that set explicit goals for each class period
and detailed instructions on how to conduct each lesson in a high school chemistry class.
The lessons have been designed based on research on student understanding, and they
have been tested and refined in multiple classrooms with diverse students. Teachers are
provided with information as to which concepts are most difficult for students, why
students have these difficulties, and how to guide all students towards mastering the
subject matter. The lessons are quite varied, and include experiments, worksheets with
problems, and model building, along with assessment questions to provide teachers and
students with a periodic check of the degree of student mastery of the concepts. Because
the Living by Chemistry curriculum provides detailed daily lessons, the teachers can focus
their attention on what the students are learning and the effects of their teaching on this
learning. (Claesgens, J., Scalise, K., Coonrod, J., Krystyniak, R., Mebane, S., Brown, N.,
Wilson, M., and Stacy, A. 2003)
The detracking of chemistry classroom
The goal of Living By Chemistry is to attain better understanding of big ideas of
chemistry for all students. Especially, I found that ‘for all students’ has a special meaning,
which means detracking of students. Before this conference, I didn’t know that chemistry
curriculum has been tracked depending on students’ achievements in the general course.
Later in the presentation, Stacy recommended us attending another program for ‘what
detracking means’, so I joined the program and found that Nicole Nunes and Daniel Quach
used Living By Chemistry to detrack Thurgood Marshall Academic High School in San
Francisco's Bayview-Hunters Point area, one of the city's most violent, impoverished
neighborhoods. (Emeryville, 2006)
With Living By Chemistry, they said, all students
gained knowledge in chemistry and the achievement gap narrowed. In detracked classes,
group activities allow students to help each other, which increases their self-confidence.
These activities are also designed to work on a number of levels so all students can deepen
their understanding.
Basis for the decision to de-track:
• Observations
Students are engaged in high level conversation
Students are challenged, but no frustrated
• Preliminary quantitative measures
All students gained
Weaker students gained the most
• Formative evaluations
Content addressed to teacher satisfaction
Format of daily lessons works
I think the detracking strategy emphasizes a collaborated learning, which is good for both
low and high achievers. Low achievers can get help from their peers, and High achievers
can learn by teaching. Moreover, both of them learn the sense of community.
The effectiveness of the Living By Chemistry lesson design
The research compared the pretest results with the posttest results to verify the
effectiveness of the lesson designs taught high school students and the first year students
of UC Berkeley. The focus of the lectures in this research was on Bond Energy Study;
What did students learn from the lectures about the bond energy? Students were asked to
answer the test: Is heat absorbed or released? Explain.
Pre-test: O(g) + O(g)  O2(g)
Post-test: CH4(g)  CH3(g) + H(g)
Figure 2 The result from the leactures
The lectures practiced in this research were supposed to teach that bond breaking
requires energy because molecules are stable. However, students’ beliefs are that bond
breaking releases energy, for they experienced exothermic reactions such as food
digestion, paper combustion, and explosion. Accordingly, the result from the lectures
shows the decrease of the scores. (Figure 2)
Before staring to tell the audience the lesson design to correct these wrong beliefs,
she began with Teaching about Love. The researcher asked some children to answer the
question about love. Figure 3 shows the questions and the responses from the children. But
the point is that where the children get these ideas about love and how we teachers can
help these children refine their ideas. The answer is simple – exposing them to other things.
This story can be applied into designing lessons.
Figure 3 Children's ideas about love
The lesson design of Living By Chemistry consists of 5 steps:
1. Lessons open with a Chemcatalyst, a question (or questions) designed to elicit
students’ ideas about what they will learn.
2. After a teacher-guided discussion, the class moves into the daily Activity, which
can be anything from a lab experiment to a card game to a worksheet with review
problems. Students often work in groups of two or four.
3. Later on, the Making Sense question and discussion reinforce the concepts in the
Activity.
4. The Check-In question helps the teacher gauge students’ understanding of the
lesson.
5. The Wrap-Up summarizes and reviews the day’s lesson.
(Referenced from The Pedagogy—Success for More Students)
In the activity phase, to revise the students’ wrong ideas, a teacher can expose
students such activities as magnet separation and water boiling, which are absorbing
energy to take place. The most critical step of this learning design is ‘Making Sense
Discussion’ in which students formulate ideas through talking with their peers about the
activity results. The effectiveness of this learning design was proved by the increase in the
post-pre test scores. (Figure 4)
Figure 4 The new result from the discussions
The question I should ask myself when I design my lessons is what I need to do to
have my students better understand about chemistry. Living By Chemistry could be an
answer for this question. This curriculum suggests me a hands-on, inquiry-based approach
to chemistry.
The basic ideas in developing Living By Chemistry
What they have try to do in order to have students better understand about chemistry
are:
1. Contexts to grab the interest of students and connect to their prior understanding
2. Daily lessons, which are not provided by textbooks
3. Careful sequencing of concepts based on extensive observations of students
4. High content standards, but accessible to all students
5. High students achievement, so students gain confidence
She cited the unit of ‘Alchemy: Atoms, Elements and Compounds’ for an example. In
this unit, the question, “Can you change copper into gold?” was used to draw students’
interest. Starting with this interesting topic, the units develop the idea of matter of
chemistry through five investigations:
I.
Defining Matter
Matter
II.
Basic Building Materials
Elements
III.
A Particulate World
Atoms
IV.
Subatomic World
Nucleus
V.
Building with Matter
Bonds
These five subunits show the careful sequencing from the student’ point of view. She
said “We are experts, so we know the basic particles are atoms. However, students don’t
feel like that. If we begin with atom to teach matter, they will lose their interests.” This
statement made me realize how selfish I was when I taught my students chemistry with the
beginning of atomic structure. I ignored the fact that I need to get learners motivated.
The activity of challenging students’ ideas to find the patterns
Figure 5 Copper Cycle
When the concepts of chemistry is taught, Living By Chemistry cause students to find
out the patterns with strategically designed activities. For an instance, to teach the concept
of elements, Copper Cycle can be in use. In this cycle, copper undergoes many changes
with adding other substances. (Figure 5) However, copper returns to its original state in the
end. As a result of this activity, students realize the pattern of conservation of the elements
in chemical change.
For another example, in one Living By Chemistry activity, students work in groups to
logically arrange dozens of cards, each of which represents an element to create the
periodic table. Each card includes the element's name, a short description, a compound it's
in, how reactionary it is, and an illustration of a colored circle with spokes extending from
it. Some circles vary in colors. (Figure 6) The spokes represent valence electrons.
Students can use surface information-element color and numbers of spokes-to arrange the
table or they can dig a bit deeper to find other patterns. "If it's a group of kids who are
really struggling, I might say, 'What do you notice about the color?' " Christopher said. "But
there are a lot of ways you can think about it. You can get your students to think if you
push them and ask them questions. It really does stick with them."
Figure 6 Creating the periodic table
I found that the most strong point of Living By Chemistry is a student-centered
approach that causes students to find out the meaningful patterns and finally conceptions
behind the patterns. Furthermore, the contents in a unit are coordinated to integrate across
the concepts. These strengths give students a deeper understanding of chemistry.
The Assessment in Living By Chemistry
Admittedly, assessment reflects on the basic goals of lesson. So if you want to evaluate
the quality of a certain curriculum, it is better to examine its assessment. In this view, I
found the Living By Chemistry curriculum very fascinating to me becuase the assessment
of Living By Chemistry is made on the basis of Perspectives of Chemists.
In typical chemistry classes, students are taught many discrete knowledge pieces
without an emphasis on coordinating this knowledge into “Big ideas”, and assessments are
made as people-to-people comparisons with no clear mapping to the discipline (normreferenced). We know where particular students fall relative to one another, but we lack an
understanding of where each student fits on a scale of higher order thinking in the
discipline. The learning can only be described in comparison to other students but does not
describe the understanding of chemistry that is developing among the students.
However, the assessment strategy of Living By Chemistry is based on a criterionreferenced measurement that tracks student learning by making people-to-discipline
measurements that assess student understanding to chemistry domain concepts. The
assessment organizes the overarching ideas of chemistry into a framework from novice
levels of understanding to graduate and expert levels, which refer to as the “Perspectives
of Chemists”. (Scalise, K., Claesgens, J., Krystyniak, R., Mebane, S., Wilson, M., Stacy, A.
2003)
Figure 7 Variables
Figure 8 Scale
The perspectives of chemists have four categories of contents: Matter, Change, and
Energy. (Figure. 7) And the Scale, the levels of success, has five levels form notion to
generation. (Figure. 8)
Within each of the Perspectives, a scale to describe student understanding was
proposed from 1 to 15. The levels within the three proposed variables are constructed such
that students are required to give more complex and sophisticated responses to increase
their score from describing their initial ideas in Levels 1-3 (Notions), to relating the
language of chemists to their view of the world in Levels 4-6 (Recognition), to formulating
connections between several ideas in Levels 7-9 (Formulation) to fully developing models
in Levels 10-12 (Construction) to asking and researching new questions in Level 13-15
(Generation). (Scalise, K., Claesgens, J., Krystyniak, R., Mebane, S., Wilson, M., Stacy, A.
2003)
The instrument of measurement in Living By Chemistry assessment is tests that ask
students to answer the open-ended questions and explain the reasons. In practice, the
quality of questions used in test does matter to be a successful measurement. Stacy said
that these questions were supposed to measure their understanding levels and thinking
levels. She gave us one example question about the conservation of mass in a precipitation
reaction. (Figure 9)
Figure 9 A Sample Questions
This question, I think, challenges students to think about the result of the reaction and
finds out whether students understand that in chemical reactions atoms don’t disappear or
create. Generally, test is a part of process of teaching. Therefore, when we make questions,
we should be careful about what to ask and how to ask. We should focus the questions on
the big ideas of the discipline, not trivia. The method of asking is also important to give
students the opportunity to express their understanding. In multiple choices questions,
students don’t have freedom to make a wide range of responses. In sum, the questions in
Living By Chemistry seem to be very pedagogically and chemically proper to me.
However, in real situation, using open-ended questions as a test tool cause a problem –
objective validity. To solve this problem, according to Stacy, two evaluators give the score
independently to the responses, so the score can vary in a range of 0.5 points.
In this research, the high school students are in the recognition level, and university
students after three semesters are in the formulation level, which means this assessment
strategy maps student performance in chemistry depending on their thinking order in
chemistry. (Figure 10)
Figure 10 The Result of the Assessment
In addition, like this assessment if the high school chemistry were linked to college
chemistry in a series of curriculum goals, it would be easier for teachers to decide what
and how to teach in high school chemistry. Specifically, what is the appropriate level of
teaching goal in high school chemistry? If my students are mostly in the recognition level, I
should consider this level of thinking to meet their perspectives, not my perspectives. I
might use simpler math to explain the relation between variables in equations; I might bring
more illustrations and models to make clear the difficult concepts. It is important to note
that this research result illustrates how to use the result of assessment as a kind of
feedback.
Finally, she showed the result of learning gains achieved by using Living By Chemistry.
(Figure 11) In this result, all groups made progress, and the low group gained the most.
Figure 11 Map of Learning Gains
Conclusion
When I taught chemistry in high schools, to motivate my students I always said, “This is
important because you are going to need and use it in the future when you go to college.”,
but they said, “Chemistry is too difficult for us to understand.” So I really want to make
chemistry easy and interesting to my students. However, I feel like it’s not an only my
problem. We need more.
In Korea, we have a fixed curriculum on a national level, so we teacher don’t have
many choices about what to teach. Like American teachers are concerned about the result
of standardized test, we also worry about the result of Korean SAT test that is taken only
once a year. As a consequence, when we teach chemistry, we have to consider the content
and level of the test, which makes our students lose their interest in chemistry.
The reason I attend this CSUN grad school is to study about science education that
gives me the opportunity to discover the way to help my colleague teachers and students in
chemistry education. We Korean have changed our curriculums many times, but I don’t
think it’s not good enough to meet today’s need of students and society. I’m still looking for
the way to improve the chemistry education, especially the way to develop new curriculum
employing new approach to student.
The Living By Chemistry suggests me that the development of curriculum takes a lot of
work to know what students know and how to help. Stacy proposed their vision of Living
By Chemistry – Student-centered as follows.

Teacher guiding students to think

Students asking and answering questions

Students expressing ideas and explaining why

Students monitoring their own understanding

Students engaged

Teacher assessing learning and monitoring instruction accordingly
That is exactly what I want, but it still has a room to revise and improve. It was
interesting to me that Living By Chemistry has been changed many times from its
preliminary study. I think the developers are still working on the curriculum to make it
more sophisticated and to meet the pedagogical goals. I really appreciate their hard work
and their great product. This conference program helped me to decide the direction of my
study. I’d like to develop this kind of curriculum for Korean students. It may be too difficult
for me, but I’ll keep studying to find out the ways.
Reference
Claesgens, J., Scalise, K., Coonrod, J., Krystyniak, R., Mebane, S., Brown, N., Wilson, M.,
and Stacy, A. (2003). Living By Chemistry: “Evidence of Student Learning Gains”, UC
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Lee, M. (2006), Photos of Living By Chemistry presented by Angelica Stacy. Retrieved Nov.
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Scalise, K., Claesgens, J., Krystyniak, R., Mebane, S., Wilson, M., Stacy, A. (2003).
Perspectives of Chemists: Tracking conceptual understanding of student learning in
chemistry at the secondary and university levels. UC Regents, Retrieved Nov. 15,
2006 from www.cchem.berkeley.edu/amsgrp/ed_pages/AERA2004Paper_FINAL.pdf
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