Western States Chemistry Education Group Meeting Report

Eight Chemistry teaching faculty and one undergraduate travelled to Seattle to join the Western States Chemical Education Group conference last weekend. While the major themes of the meeting were inclusion, diversity and access; posters and talks were welcomed on all aspects of chemical education. We enjoyed a talk by Scott Freeman (of biology textbook fame), who spoke about the success rates of different groups of students (e.g. socioeconomic background, race, gender, family history of tertiary-level study) and our collective need to narrow these “success gaps”. UBC represented strongly; we provided about a quarter of all the presentations! We covered topics as diverse as acid-base concept tests, the nature of Science One, upper-level laboratories and their experiments, materials chemistry in the curriculum and student workload in flipped organic chemistry classes. Many thanks to the University of Washington Chemistry Education Research Group (ChEdR) for hosting the meeting this year.