The timelines for signing up on an ACS program and presenting are out-of-whack. Things are moving so quickly in Web teaching that every 6 months offers new opportunities. My talk today will focus on a project that has become very near and dear to my heart, namely, helping high school chemistry teachers. The project has taken on a great deal of focus since I signed on for this talk.

The talk will include some facts about teacher preparation, some comments about the nature of the problems faced, and a thorough description of a project aimed at helping to ameliorate the problems.

This project invites partners from all across America, and, at the end of the talk, I'll invite those of you in the audience who are in a position to do so to become partners.

There are two 'legal' parts to becoming a teacher, certification and endorsement.

Certification is a big term, and teachers usually are certified to teach 'high school' or 'elementary school.'

Endorsement specifies what the teacher can teach. A teacher with a chemistry endorsement can teach hs chemistry. A chemistry endorsement usually requires studying quite a bit of college chemistry, usually 25-30 hours.

A broad field endorsement might enable a certified teacher to teach physical sciences -- like chemistry and physics. Broad field endorsements are popular in states with rural populations where, in a high school, there might be one or two science teachers. For economic reasons, large districts also have supported broad field endorsements.

Nebraska is a broad field endorsement state, and UNL is a broad field endorsement school. We have insisted on having students receive either a broad field endorsement or two content endorsements.

In a broad field endorsement, a student need not have any chemistry past sophomore level courses. While I can muster arguments to excuse this, my sense if that it really means that teachers can teach chemistry without much chemical sense of what they are doing.

There is a sort of hierarchy where no physics teachers are prepared at all, and chemistry teacher become physics teachers so that biology teachers can become chemistry teachers.

This year Lincoln has two teachers in science who do not have science endorsements at all. While uncommon, this is not rare in schools.

I teach in a college of education, not in a chemistry department.

Colleges of education commonly are criticized for what they teach as well as for their standards. Much of this criticism is deserved, and richly so.

While I decry the preparation of chemistry teachers in terms of chemistry content, it seems to me that knowing chemistry is a necessary but insufficient conditions for being a successful teacher.

Good teachers know both content and kids. Furthermore, they know which content to pitch at which kids, and how to pitch it. A good chemistry teacher uses content 100% of the time, or nearly 100% of the time. Nearly everything they do comes from content.

Putting these pieces together -- the content knowledge, and the pedagogy -- has led to the creation of the term 'pedagogical content knowledge.'

With respect to chemistry, I have an enormous amount of 'pedagogical content knowledge.' Most experienced high school and college chemistry teachers have substantial content knowledge. Because I study this aspect, I'm constantly on the look out for new knowledge about teaching chemistry. New experiments. New methods of presentation. New exam items.

In my trade we also use two other terms: preservice teacher preparation, and inservice teacher preparation.

Preservice means before they start.

Inservice means on the job.

My sense is that most of our solvable problems will be solved if we focus on pedagogical content knowledge. This is where chemistry teachers can be helped most. This should be our preservice thrust and our inservice thrust.

There are at least two more realities that you should be made aware of.

First, there are essentially no preservice chemistry education courses in the US. There are a few, but very few. The reason is that we don't prepare many chemistry teachers. We don't need many chemistry teachers. We need about 20,000 chemistry teachers -- perhaps 25,000. Our teacher preparation programs are spread across the US. Up until recently, turnover rates were very low -- with the documented annual influx being about 1,000 new teachers.

The second reality concerns the nature of the preparation. I opposed a plan at Nebraska to have a half-endorsement in computer science. My colleagues at UNK established such a program -- with one education course and five computer science courses. As of last April, 7 or 8 students had completed the endorsement, but all took jobs outside of teaching. The smallest salary differential was $13,000.

Before you volunteer for a high school teaching job, consider the salary. Very few public school teachers make more than I do -- and none live in Nebraska, so far as I know.

We're not talking about a highly remunerative field. Furthermore, when a job as lab jockey is offered to someone who has just come off of or is in the midst of a 'challenging' student teaching experience, drop outs are high. In recent years, UNL has prepared some wonderful high school science teachers, but, so far as I know, none have lasted 10 years! Believe me, I don't fully understand the 4% national statistic. I also suspect that those have change since last reported in 1994.

So, if you think you have a simple solution, forget it. This is a difficult problem. It's one where we can, at best, work around the edges.

The reason that I've been asked to talk today has nothing to do with this problem. I'm a technology jock. I teach the graduate technology courses at UNL. We have both masters and PhD programs in this area. I have many students, and all of my graduates are well-placed.

I have a Web-site. I've written a book on Web-Teaching that is reviewing well and selling well. Charles has seen some of my software that literally does open-ended stoichiometry -- solving your problem with your numbers and your substances. It then tutors you about how it solved your problem -- if you ask it to.

This talk went up at my Web site on Tuesday. The Web site talk offers you to check out some of the things I've yet to say. Just to show off, I've put up some links to data that I've cited here -- you can check me out.

To solve any problem, one needs resources. Obviously, making starting and senior salaries more competitive would go a long way to 'solving' the chemistry teacher problem.

You might think that the NSF EHR has adequate resources but, in truth, they have far too little. They can help, but they can't solve.

The largest single resource available to solve this problem is teacher tuition money. Yes, nearly all of these underpaid persons who go into teaching also seek out graduate study for payscale advancement.

To solve the teacher preparedness problem, we have to get out hands on this tuition money.

Of course, now we're right back where we started. Yes, that's the biggest pile of money but, if the solution were so simple, then we'd be using it for preservice teachers, too.

Most teachers in my neck of the woods sign up for masters degrees in education. Nearly all such programs are -- to use my politically incorrect jargon -- content free. Yes, a chemistry teacher can sign up for 36 hours in a masters of education program and never go near any science content. Believe me. It's not only not hard, it is the easy way.

Worse yet, content departments don't do a darned thing to help. About 15 years ago, when I started in Teachers College, a friend from biological sciences (with kids in school) came and asked, 'how can I help.' I said, you guys teach about 8 advanced content courses to graduate students every year. Why not schedule just one of these each semester to start at 4 PM so that teachers could enroll. I'm still waiting.

Content departments are really good at criticizing, but they are much less good about pitching in.

Besides, nearly all content-department courses are content courses -- not pedagogical content knowledge courses. They really are not geared for teachers. So, even when courses are made available, they certainly don't match well the teachers' needs.

OK, let's see if we can apply some technology to help solve this problem. Here are a few facts:

• While multimedia often improves student attitudes dramatically, it probably leads to a small diminution of learning performance
• Teacher workloads in e-mail courses go up, not down
• Keller plan courses (self-paced, mastery courses) give excellent learning results, but students and teachers both dislike the methodology (possibly because both have to work so hard

If we try a Web-based approach to solving this problem, we're not talking about miracles.

I'm proposing a distance learning approach to this problem. I see a national network of college faculty mentors who meet occasionally with teachers on an as needed basis. The teachers will be engaged in Web-based courses where the testing is largely automatic and the content is not just traditional chemistry but also pedagogy. The Web will provide:

• the organization
• all of the testing
• much of the grading
• most of the feedback
• some of the content.

If I asked you to meet for two hours each week with a high school teacher. To organize a course, to test. To provide feedback, etc., you'd probably say no Brooksie, I already have a full time job.

Suppose I said this. We're going to sign this person up for a distance course on your campus. You're team sets up the course number at your school. The tuition, the credit, etc., stay on your campus! For a small fee (now set at $25, but I'm thinking of doing this with no fees at all), we at UNL will:

• outline and serve the course
• provide the exams
• grade most of them (not the essays, but everything else)
• tie the content to the high school classroom
  
• give you as much information as you need to know what is going on

Under these circumstances, what would you say? Now you're workload as a mentor for this high school teacher has been cut to half, possibly a quarter of what it might be in a traditional course. Now, maybe you'll take a chance.

Well, so far we've lined up 34 'partners,' and we have a few silent partners. We have a silent partner is Kansas, for example, who did not want to be identified lest this NSF proposal interfere with one they were submitting.

Partners

A. M. Sarquis, Miami University, Middletown, OH (senior partner)
B. George, Sacred Heart University, CT (senior partner)
W. Leonard, Clemson University, SC
R. Archer, University Massachusetts, MA
T. Greenbowe, Iowa State University, IA
G. Long, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, PA
M. Pavelich, Colorado School of Mines, CO
H. Pence, SUNY Oneonta, NY;
A. Russell, UCLA, CA
R. Silberman, SUNY Cortland, NY
C. Stanitski, Central Arkansas University, AR
A. Banks, North Carolina State University, NC
D. Smith, Doane College, NE
J. Gelder, Oklahoma State University, OK
J. Penn, University West Virginia, WV
H. Harris, University Missouri St. Louis, MO
J. Barufaldi, University of Texas at Austin, TX
H. Anderson, D. Gabel, W. Veal, Indiana University, IN
M. Freilich, University of Memphis, TN
V. Williamson, Texas A&M University, TX
D. Mason, University of Texas San Antonio, TX.
R. Hartshorn, University of Tennessee at Martin, TN
C. B. Frech, University of Central Oklahoma, OK
D. Soriano, University of Pittsburgh (Bradford), PA
B. Sawrey, University of California San Diego, CA
J. Renn, Edinboro University, PA
J. Olmstead, California State University Fullerton, CA
W. Robinson, Purdue University, IN
M. Oliver, Louisiana University, LA
E. Martin, College of Charleston, SC
M. Scharberg, San Jose State University, CA
L. Combs, Kennesaw State University, GA
A. Bedenbaugh, University of Southern Mississippi, MS

We plan a series of 9 2-credit graduate modules. We see these as being used as the basis for local graduate programs to create up to half of the content for a traditional Masters of Education degree. The precise content of the modules remains to be determined, but it will fit the 4 contemporary high school chemistry curricula (mainstream, AP, ChemCom, and descriptive).

If NSF doesn't fund this, we'll try elsewhere for funding AND develop a module or two on our own.

Believe me, the content is NOT a sure thing. Each state (nearly) has used the 'national standards' to create a set of standards or frameworks. These vary substantially in scope and nature. My Web-site lists standards from six states. Visit those sites, and see what I mean.

Now, I'm going to show you a series of 'teacher' products to illustrate the kinds of things we can build into modules.

The talk contained several images taken from course syllabi. I create these using software. I enter the dates and the assignments and stuff like that. the software creates the Web pages and the links.

http://dwb.unl.edu/dwb/Courses/CURR859/Syl859F98.html

Previous Work on Feedback

"Stoichiometer" Brooks, D. W. Synaps, Lincoln, NE 1994. (Macintosh Software)

"Stoichiometer" Brooks, D. W. Computers in Chemical Education Newsletter, Spring 1994, 6-10.

"Retrospective Tutoring" Brooks, D. W. J. Chem. Educ. 1995, 72 233-236.

Stoichiometer

In this software, substances can be added.

It will handle certain readily predicted tasks. For example, it will add oxygen, and predict combustion products (based upon a user-adjustable) lookup table.

It will balance the chemical equation:

You can enter a mass of one (or all) reactants and it will figure out masses of prodcuts (limiting reagents, yields, etc.)

It will carry the calculated mass of the products (or any reactant) to a screen where conversion is possible (to any units, from any units):

This is shown for STP. But, the following is for wet oxygen at nonstandard conditions:

Finally, if asked to do so, it will tutor the user in any operation performed!

Let's emphasize what Stoichiometer does. It takes in any substance with a syntactically valid formula. Given all reactants and prodcuts, balances chemical equations. In some cases, if figures these out! Given one or several masses, it computes all mass relationships. Then, regardless of the substances and numbers entered by the user, it tutors the user regarding its solution to the problem! It calculates tutoring!

Stoichiometer is not (yet) a Web product.

Many of the things Stoichiometer does have been moved to the Web. So, a fairly powerful calculator for solution molarity is now Web-available.

Solution Calculator.

In Stoichiometer, we calculate this tutoring and write it to a field.

On the Web, we calculate it embedded in HTML code, and serve it. Really, the difference is no big deal at all.

Turn in CURR 960 assignments.

This program lets them paste in text. It accepts and processes this text. If URLs are provided. It makes them Web worthy. It then gives back to the students pages generated form their inputs.

A separate part of the program allows the instructor to gather all of the students assignments together for use in class.

We can deliver fill-in-the-blank test items that are graded automatically

See AP exam.

If you follw this cycle thgrough a time or two, you'll set that the exams are graded. Also, the questions have the option of being accompanied by some explanatory material, which, occasionally, is colorful.

Here's what we know how to do:

• Set up a curriculum with many components
  
  

  Contact Hours	Content Coverage
  10	Traditional content
  3	Systematic content integration with another traditional science (biology, physics, geology)
  2	Systematic math integration
  6	Review of extant teaching resources available for the content of this module
  2	Calculator-probes lesson
  1	Calculator lesson
  2	Lab simulation
  2	'Kitchen lab' (out-of-lab lab)
  1	Writing evaluation by modified Calibrated Peer Review™
  1	Industry connection
  30	Total hours of teacher friendly, useful, chemistry-oriented content

  
  
• Serve this on a modular basis broken down into goals and individual objectives
• Allow instructors to modify (add, delete, but not change) objectives for individual students
• Test on these objectives
• Provide context-specific feedback
• E-mail extended answers to graders
• Provide all of the supporting information a student and instructor need to manage a course
• Provide some of the learning materials

I've not shown you the fully integrated system because it doesn't yet exist. Based on the parts I've shown you, what can't you imagine?

The reason it doesn't exist on my server has to do with copyrights. Most of what I've developed has enjoyed little or no benefit from UNL resources.

One thing I have tried to do is to update the NSF-supported materials trying to keep most of them Web-worthy.

How many teachers will be able to benefit from instruction provided this way? Perhaps as many as 1 out of 20; perhaps as many as 1 out of 10. Even if it is only one in one hundred, that amounts to ten teachers per year! We don't know how many -- as we enter the brave new world. While the relative number is small, the absolute number is very large. And, because of the nature of the project, that number keeps coming and coming and coming. So, in terms of NSF leverage, this is a big deal.

I don't think there are any better solutions to this problem out there. If we go with conventional instruction, say at NSF-supported summer or full year institutes, we're going to have very expensive instruction. We have a dilute system. When one has a very dilute system, it can be concentrated so long as one is willing to invest free energy. How much free energy will we invest.

Now, let me turn to you -- members of my live audience. Have I made any converts among you? If so, please see me after the talk, and I'll fill in any needed details. Give yourself some time to think this over and, if 'the shoe fits,' sign up as a partner!

It's almost certain that, just by sitting out there, you've identified yourself as caring about this problem. It's hard to see how this solution will hurt, and it's easy to see how it might help just a bit!

If you are interested in becoming a partner, contact David Brooks.