Integrating Concepts using Online Tutorials in a Freshman Chemistry Course

Several years ago the traditional two semester chemistry sequence taken by freshman nursing students was replaced by a one semester Physiological Chemistry course at our university. This one semester course focuses on biochemistry content, requiring that students have already mastered important, introductory concepts, such as bonding, in their high school course. Variation in academic backgrounds left many students struggling to integrate the new course work with their weak, foundation knowledge. To reduce student frustration and increase student learning, online tutorials were introduced into the course to broadly cover the background topics, enhancing the course content. Students could work collaboratively or individually on the tutorials. The online tutorials were scheduled in a sequence that allowed for integration of the reviewed concepts into higher-level course work. Faculty noticed an improvement in the ease at which students integrated the concepts from the tutorials into learning new concepts in chemical systems. To further examine the effectiveness of the tutorials, both a pre-test and a post-test were administered to the students. In addition, students were surveyed regarding the perceived effectiveness of the online tutorials to review background material.