Prepare with CARE
Each year the Chemistry department teaches service courses in General, Organic, and Biochemistry to students from a multitude of departments. For many of these students, the five-course sequence (two general chemistry, two organic chemistry, and one biochemistry course) is either required for their major or their pre-health aspirations. As with many disciplines, while these courses approach the topic of chemistry from very different perspectives, they nonetheless rely heavily on a foundation of prerequisite skills that are taught in the previous courses.
Currently, students are expected to review and re-learn important prerequisite skills on their own, and the resources for doing that crucial review can oftentimes be difficult to locate. The goal of this project is to help students to Prepare with CARE (Chemistry Active-learning Resources for Educators) for their upper-level chemistry courses.
In the first stage of the CARE project, novel content (videos, worksheets, self-paced learning assessments) was developed, assessed, and deployed to support students taking Organic chemistry at Boston University. The project team partnered with the Educational Resource Center (ERC) to deliver these modules as OrgoPrep 2.0. The completely new OrgoPrep program features the self-study materials developed by the CARE project team, as well as live webinars over the summer.
The eventual goal is to have a fully-functioning suite of materials that will enable faculty and students to select and utilize carefully curated and targeted materials for getting ready for upper-division courses including organic chemistry (stage 1), biochemistry (stage 2), and related disciplines (biology and geology, stage 3).
News & Publications
- June 2022 ACS Publications: Embedded Questions and Targeted Feedback Transform Passive Educational Videos into Effective Active Learning Tools
- September 2021 ACS Publications: OrgoPrep: A Remote Peer-Led Summer Program Preparing Students for Organic Chemistry
- September 2021: Inside Look at CARE with Binyomin Abrams
- June 2021 ACS Publications: Improving Learning Outcomes and Metacognitive Monitoring: Replacing Traditional Textbook Readings with Question-Embedded Videos
- May, 2021 BU Today: Two CAS Faculty Honored For Teaching; Binyomin Abrams awarded the Gerald and Deanne Gitner Family Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology
- October 2020 Step back, translate, extend: Addressing misconceptions relating to energy and free energy in cellular reactions via active learning videos
- October 2020 ACS Publications: Incorporating an Online Interactive Video Platform to Optimize Active Learning and Improve Student Accountability through Educational Videos
Project Team & Partners
Binyomin Abrams is the Director of General Chemistry and Master Lecturer in the Chemistry Department at Boston University. He graduated with his Ph.D. from New York University, and has been a faculty member at BU since 2008. Dr. Abrams’s primary interests are in teaching chemistry…
