UW-La Crosse
Professor, Chemistry & Biochemistry
Wisconsin Teaching Scholar, 2015-16
SoTL research was unknown to me until 2012. I teach organic chemistry, and the prevailing attitude among instructors in that discipline has long been, “Devil take the hindmost.” Very high attrition continues to be reported from organic chemistry courses at various institutions, and the course has a terrible reputation among students (often in the top 3 of “hardest college courses” lists).
In 2012, however, a section of a course I had taught for several years went down in flames on the second exam (49% Ds and Fs). I was dumbfounded since everything about the course was settled and static, and I had never seen grades this poor before.
Historically, organic chemistry instructors would have said the process was working: filtering out students who were unprepared or unequal to the challenge of the course. I began questioning this thinking in 2012. By that point, I had attended a few conferences on teaching, including the OPID Spring Conference and the Opening Workshop for New STEM Educators (offered by the UW System Women and Science Program) and UW-La Crosse’s Conferences on Teaching and Learning, offered by the Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning (CATL). I had begun to question whether lecture was providing the best results for my students, but I hadn’t thought of a way to test the idea (and things seemed to be working “well enough”–for me, if not for all of my students).
I realized in spring of 2012 that I might have an opportunity on my hands to try something that was “not-lecture.” I redesigned the next chapter of material to convert the hardest topics from lecture fodder into content that students could puzzle out in scaffolded exercises during class. I told students to look back at their earlier notes because the new material was simply a variation on what we’d already covered. I left the podium and walked around–scary, for students and for me! I looked at student work, and I offered praise, suggestions, and reminders. I finished at the podium by praising the work I’d seen and talking through how they could develop the answer by building outward from prior content: I pointed out how the same principles were at work here as they’d seen in the prior chapter of the book.
I continued instructing this way, coaching students to puzzle through some of the hardest parts instead of showing how it worked. When I polled students at the end (did they like lecture, from the first half of semester, or a mix of lecture and problem solving in the second half?), I was very surprised at the answers. My top students (earning the highest grades) liked lecture better, but everyone else preferred a mix of lecture and problem solving!
Another huge surprise for me was the turnaround I saw in scores: on the fourth exam of the semester, 44%(!) of the students earned grades in the A range! I was on to something here… But what was it, and could I make it even better?
My next step was to approach UWL’s Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning (CATL). I spoke with the founder and director, Bill Cerbin, at length about what I’d seen and how I might respond. I wanted to do a larger study, but I had no idea how to begin. Bill coached me carefully with questions and suggestions. He shared a variety of pointers on “how brains learn.” He also offered ideas on how to document learning from different instructional methods. He suggested I consider getting more training and guidance on SoTL, since that appeared to be what I was proposing to do.
I enrolled in CATL’s “Learning by Design” program, where participants learned about “backward design” through readings and discussions. The course was very helpful in guiding me to craft a study design and assessment materials. I brought this information forward to build a four-semester study in which two different instructional approaches were used.
I also was accepted into the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars program (WTFS), which gave me focused opportunities to develop hypotheses and action plans to resolve learning issues in my courses. My project for WTFS was an examination of motivation and mindset in chemistry students, since these factors can impact the successes of learning activities. This investigation sparked interest from others in my department, and a broader exploration of the topic spanned four courses across three years in the chemistry major. This topic is still of interest for us, and we hope to gain not only information about our students, but ideas about how to better support the range of students who enroll in our courses.
The new ways of looking at my teaching that I learned in WTFS and other SoTL-focused activities have transformed how I approach my role as an instructor. I now try to engage my students every day in solving problems themselves and testing their learning during my instruction. My students have responded positively: they appear freer to approach me with questions than I recall them being during my “all lecture” period, and they ask me more questions than in the past. (To be fair, I’m also asking them more questions, not only about course content but about their experience in my courses, because their answers drive my efforts to make my courses more effective.) Student scores for course evaluation questions like, “The instructor challenged me and motivated me to learn,” have also increased since I began my SoTL work. My students seem to have noticed an attitude shift in me, from being someone who delivers content and assesses mastery to being someone who wants to coach them how to create their own learning.
Other benefits have accrued from my SoTL efforts, and I hope I am able to advance the frontier of instructional design in my discipline. In 2024 I was able to publish the results from my first study in the early 2010s. Some of the biggest advances in that article include evidence that even novice students can puzzle out organic chemistry when supported with coaching, and a first consideration of how under-resourced student populations are faring in organic chemistry. UWL’s largest under-resourced student group in the early 2010s (at least in my course) were first-generation college students (FGS); I found that they were earning measurably lower scores than non-FGS in all-lecture instruction. However, in the study group with the largest amount of scaffolded support for student-generated learning, FGS scores rose to match non-FGS scores!
The imprint of Bill Cerbin’s contributions to my first study included, for the first time in SoTL for organic chemistry, a formal consideration of cognitive load theory. I’ve come to believe that greater (any!) attention paid to the cognitive experience of students in organic chemistry lectures presents a significant opportunity to improve organic instruction, and I hope to continue researching this topic in the years to come.
SoTL has enabled me to offer a different type of research experience to undergraduates. My first SoTL researcher has now graduated, and he is an author on my first SoTL publication. As a chemistry education major, he found research opportunities lacking in the department until he heard about my SoTL work at a panel discussion. He made a beeline for me at the end of the discussion and asked to do research with me on chemistry education. We spent the next two years analyzing final exam data from six semesters of students in my first study. We had animated discussions and cataloged types of errors, trends in student understanding, and insights on how the pedagogy changes in the study might have impacted student learning.
I have another SoTL researcher now working with me on a study for the second semester organic lecture. My current researcher is a pre-med student who has begun questioning his career path after thoroughly enjoying the process of learning (and teaching those around him) the art of retrosynthesis in organic chemistry. It’s been a delight to enable these young “scientist educators” to peek behind the curtain and see an example of how to construct learning materials and study learning processes.
Finally, my SoTL journey has enabled me to become a more competent mentor for junior faculty in my department. I try to lead by example, and I encourage new faculty to experiment with how to engage and challenge students using non-lecture instruction. The question of whether one instructional approach supports better learning outcomes than another is wholly apposite to the self-assessment that instructors must do to advance in their careers, so SoTL can serve multiple purposes for newer faculty, in particular.
As someone trained to do research in the chemistry laboratory, I assumed that research had to happen in a laboratory environment. It has been an unmitigated delight to discover that yes, one can do research on teaching, and that one’s work can deliver immediate and significant improvements for students in an intimidating course. Incremental discoveries made in a laboratory often offer limited rewards; any benefits of the work are usually so far removed that one never knows whether they have been realized. By comparison, SoTL feels immediately relevant and delivers clear outcomes in enhanced learning for each new cohort of students.
Biography:
Heather Schenck has taught organic chemistry at UW-La Crosse since 2006. She began her teaching career after 8 years in industry at Kimberly-Clark Corporation, where she worked as a research scientist, patent facilitator and competitive advantage strategist. Dr. Schenck teaches organic chemistry lecture and laboratory courses as well as a spectroscopy lecture and lab elective course. Her initial research efforts at UWL were focused on spectroscopy, but she evolved into pedagogy research starting in 2012. Since that time, she has participated in or led four different inquiries in the scholarship of teaching and learning in multiple disciplines of chemistry. Her most recent publication describes a novel way to teach organic reaction mechanisms to novice students that was correlated with decreased errors and improved transfer abilities. The recent publication offers a first report of organic chemistry pedagogy that supports improved course outcomes for under-resourced students, and in which the challenges of mechanism study are interpreted with respect to cognitive load theory.
Publications and other SoTL activities:
Haindfield, C.; Cerbin, W.; Baumann, D.; Schenck, H., “Flipping the script in organic reaction mechanism instruction: using generative pedagogies instead of lecture to improve learning outcomes,” Chem. Educ. Res. Pract., 2024, 25, 1311-1325.
Kirsch, J.; Schenck, H., “Investigating Resource Management Behaviors in Undergraduate Chemistry Students,” presented at UWL 25th Annual Conference on Teaching and Learning, Aug. 27, 2024.
Haindfield, C.; Schenck, H., “Active Learning Pedagogy in Organic Chemistry: Analysis of Final Exam Data,” presented at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research, Eau Claire, WI, April, 2023.
Haindfield, C.; Schenck, H., “Results of Active Learning in a Large Organic Lecture,” presented at UWL Celebration of Student Research and Creativity, May 6, 2022.
Knowles, E.; Marshik, T.; Schenck, H.; Warnburg, N., “Fostering a mindset to improve student outcomes,” panel discussion at the 2017 OPID Spring Conference on Teaching and Learning, La Crosse, WI, April 20, 2017.
Schenck, H.; Carmosini, N.; Friesen, K.; Kirsch, J.; May, J.; Turov, E., “Student Motivation and Mindset in Introductory and Organic Chemistry Courses at UW – La Crosse,” presented at the 2017 OPID Spring Conference on Teaching and Learning, La Crosse, WI, April 20, 2017.
Schenck, H., “Mindset and motivation in organic chemistry students,” presented at UWL Conference on Teaching and Learning, August 30, 2016, La Crosse, WI, and at the 2016 OPID Spring Conference on Teaching and Learning, April 14, 2016, Green Lake, WI.
Schenck, H., “Active Learning Strategies Developed for a Large Organic Chemistry Lecture,” presented at 41st UW System Chemistry Faculties Meeting, October 10, 2014, La Crosse, WI.
Schenck, H., “Active Learning Strategies in Organic Chemistry: Enhancing Retention in a Gatekeeper Course,” presented at OPID Spring Conference, June 2, 2014.
Schenck, H.; Miller, L.; Knowles, E.; Thoune, D.; Cerbin, W.; Kopp, B., “The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at UWL,” panel discussion at the UWL Conference on Teaching and Learning, Jan. 14, 2014.
Schenck, H., “Effect of Active Learning in a Large Organic Chemistry Lecture,” presented at the UWL Conference on Teaching and Learning, Jan. 14, 2014.