Motivating and Building Engineering Majors Conceptual Knowledge in Chemistry

Engineering majors comprise, on average, 75% of the students enrolled in General Chemistry I and II each year. Historically, these courses were offered as large lecture courses (100-200 per section) and a smaller (N=40 students) recitation. Lecture and recitation were taught by different faculty. To facilitate student engagement, motivation and interaction with the content, the General Chemistry curriculum was redesigned. Large lectures and recitation were replaced with sections of 50 students each meeting three times per week with increased opportunities for active learning including peer interaction, group problem solving, and self-assessment and reflection. In this paper, we focus on metacognitive strategies to improve conceptual understanding. These strategies for self-assessment and reflection were embedded in weekly Canvas quizzes delivered outside of class. The quizzes consist of a series of multiple choice conceptual questions. The students have three and one half days to complete the quiz and two attempts are granted so if they choose they can retake the quiz after additional study and review. To encourage students to reflect on what they learned over the week and what they still need to focus on, students are asked to answer two questions: "What did I learn this past week [from list of chapters covered]?" and "What remains unclear to me and that I need to review further [from list of chapters covered]?" These questions allow for introspection and self-assessment to encourage students to monitor their learning and level of understanding on an on-going basis and seek help early and often. For this preliminary study, data is examined with respect to the nature of student responses (conceptual versus procedural), relationship between student response and quiz performance, and variation between sections with different instructors.