1Cooperative Learning in General Chemistry A Carnegie Scholar Project on Teaching and Learning

General Chemistry is a challenging and often traumatic experience for first-year students. The introductory course covers a large amount of material at a rapid pace, builds vertically on numerous non-intuitive concepts, and requires students to solve problems they have never encountered before. At the University of Notre Dame, students with Math SAT scores below 640, have historically demonstrated only a 40 % success rate for completing one full year of General Chemistry taught in the traditional lecture format. In the Fall of 1997, I developed a new General Chemistry sequence for students identified as being ‘at-risk ’ for performing poorly in General Chemistry. These students are taught the same material as those enrolled in the traditional General Chemistry course, but are given weekly graded homework assignments, quizzes, and mandatory recitation sections in which they collaboratively solve problems in small groups. Active learning, concept integration, creative problem solving, individual accountability, and frequent feedback are central goals in the course design. My project as a Carnegie Scholar has been to examine the impact of incorporating cooperative learning strategies in a large section (> 200 'at-risk ' students) of Genera