In this week's C&EN, this interesting letter:
I would like to commend Leigh Krietsch Boerner’s article “Are Undergraduate Chemistry Programs in Crisis?,” as the article has pointed out many things that I’ve seen with my own eyes. I’m an associate professor of chemistry at a predominantly undergraduate state institution in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and I have noticed similar trends in enrollment, cost, and graduation rates at my own institution.The article points out that biology enrollment is in line with other undergraduate enrollments, while the chemistry enrollment shows a large decline. Further, the article points out that the number of undergraduate chemistry degrees awarded has plunged the fastest over the last 3 years relative to other disciplines. This too, I’ve seen.However, I feel that a major contributing factor behind these numbers has been overlooked. Over the last 20 years, I’ve seen student math preparedness plummet. This trend was in full swing before COVID-19, and the pandemic exacerbated the problem. I’ve seen many students in my first-year general chemistry course switch from chemistry to biology because the math requirements in chemistry were just too hard given the level of math preparedness of the students. I’m not referring to the log base 10 operation of the Henderson-Hasselbalch equation but rather the simple task of converting grams to moles, which is an exceedingly difficult operation for a quarter to a third of the students in front of me. Chemistry is enjoyable if you have a rudimentary understanding of math, a nightmare if that understanding has never been developed.I had hoped that the trends that I’ve seen were specific to my institution alone, but colleagues at similar institutions have reported to me similar experiences. Fortunately, math preparedness doesn’t seem to be as much of a problem at our nation’s elite schools, but can these few schools produce the army of chemists needed to carry an advanced industrial society?The development of a mathematical intuition is needed to succeed in chemistry. Why that intuition is not being developed on a broad scale needs to be addressed, as more than the fate of a few chemistry departments is at stake.Dwayne BellFramingham, Massachusetts
I guess I don't really know what to say about this, other than math is an important skill, and it's hard to imagine getting through (I dunno) the first semester of general chemistry without a pretty decent sense of how to do basic algebra.
I've known chemists who are bad at math. While it is still possible to pursue chemistry as a career, poor math skills will limit you. You probably won't need calculus after college, but if you trip on arithmetic, you're going to have a hard time. I've seen a lot of coworkers who rely on Excel spreadsheets set up by others, have no idea what the spreadsheet's calculations are actually doing, and get themselves into trouble.
ReplyDeleteRemember the high school chemistry problems where you have to convert units, like you're given that water is 1.0 grams per mL and you have to figure out how many pounds per cubic foot that is? This kind of calculation comes up a lot in industry, and makes chemists who are bad at math struggle. If you're comfortable with this kind of calculation but not as good with calculus, differential equations, etc, you'll probably do fine in most industry jobs.
IMHO as an educator who grew up and studied outside of the US, the reason is the lack of a standardized country-wide high school curriculum. I personally saw students gasping and being shocked when in a gen chem 2nd semester class they were asked to calculate grams from moles or volumes from density, let alone when I mentioned derivatives or integrals. In Europe mastering those concept is a requirement to enroll in universities, so ALL students take the same classes in high school.
ReplyDeleteLet's face it, most of the students taking a service course in biology or chemistry want to go into nursing & related. The math avoidance wouldn't even work, because nursing math is all about unit conversions and proportions.
ReplyDelete^Above. Every time a pre-nursing student asks me why they need gen chem, I say it's for unit conversions and basic applied algebra.
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