Learning Outcomes and Insights from a Chocolate-based Undergraduate Materials Science Course and Other Topical Outreach
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MRS Advances © 2017 Materials Research Society DOI: 10.1557/adv.2017.635
Learning Outcomes and Insights from a Chocolatebased Undergraduate Materials Science Course and Other Topical Outreach Activities Jennifer Dailey Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N Charles St, Baltimore, MD, USA 21218
ABSTRACT
Those involved in STEM outreach, from elementary schools through undergraduate students, all use varying teaching styles in an effort to instruct and inspire students. However, it is incredibly difficult to gauge or compare learning outcomes from new teaching techniques in situ. In this work, we describe the outcomes of a new undergraduate mini-course at Johns Hopkins University, Chocolate: An Introduction to Materials Science. In particular, the outcomes of teaching binary phase diagrams in this course using topical food examples were compared to the outcomes of the same instructor teaching a similar control group of students using standard textbook examples, reducing a number of confounding factors and allowing us to objectively analyze the benefits of using an atypical, popular approach to teach a standard subject. Results indicate that the students in the Chocolate course were not only more excited and engaged in the lecture, but they had identical or potentially greater learning gains than the control group.
Introduction: Without exception, all researchers involved in scientific outreach programs want to know that their teaching methods are effective. Those providing the funding for these endeavours or mandating them in an official curriculum would likely argue that this proof is a necessity, especially in our standardized-test driven public schools. Thankfully, educational research continues to expand and explore the benefits of classical and novel teaching methods in various classroom settings[1–5]. Unfortunately, having a relatively small presence in most universities and rarely being mentioned in high schools, materials science is often left out of these discussions. In this work, inspired by the fantastic research of a number of scientists, educators, and assorted chocoholics before us, we use confectionary and miscellaneous other requested topical examples to introduce high school and undergraduate-level materials science concepts to students[6–7]. Pivotal to the motivation of our experimental design is the work of Rowat et al. at Harvard, where they developed a number of family-friendly mini chocolate-inspired experiments to interest all age groups[8]. They discussed concepts such as phase transitions, emulsification, and particle size while participants tasted and tested chocolate samples. The event was inarguably a success, with feedback from participants in the form of comment cards indicating that they felt inspired and excited by the presentations. However, while this type of popular demonstration is perfect for
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Course design and outcomes: Binary phase diagram instruction For the control class (n=18), a fifty-minute
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