UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN River Falls
Chemistry and Biotechnology
Office: 215 Centennial Science Hall
Ph.D., University of Minnesota, Bioinorganic and Organic Chemistry, 1999 Graduate Advisor: William B. Tolman
Certificate of Completion, University of Minnesota, Preparing Future Faculty, 1998
B.S. Winona State University, Chemistry, 1994
Chemistry 121: General Chemistry I
Liberal Arts Chemistry; Preparatory Chemistry; General, Organic, Biochemistry; General Chemistry II; Organic Chemistry Survey; Organic Chemistry I & II; Guided Study in Teaching Chemistry; Investigative Science I, II & III for Elementary Education Majors; Chemical Information; and Introduction to Higher Education.
My scholarship is in the area of chemical education. I currently have two chemical education research projects.
The first project focuses on general chemistry curricular reform and its affect on students as learners of chemistry. The second project involves studying the perceived and perhaps real learning gains from using the Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique (IF-AT) for multiple-choice exams in chemistry. This project is currently funded by a 2012-15 Collaborative Type I Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (TUES) National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant (DUE 1140914). Along with these chemical education research projects, I am also very involved with Scholarship of Teaching and Learning projects related to development and assessment of Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning activities that help student make connections between particulate, symbolic/mathematical, and macroscopic representations.
I am also very involved with university initiatives aimed at improving graduation rates of STEM majors at UWRF. In support of these efforts, I serve as the Co-PI on a 2013-2017 NSF Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Talent Expansion Program (STEP) Grant (DUE-1317149). In addition, I have been actively involved with in-service K-12 teachers and college faculty presenting multiple workshops on using inquiry based teaching approaches in the sciences.