A dual undergraduate major in Chemistry and Saxophone Performance, Professor John G. received his PhD in Inorganic Chemistry at Rice University in Houston, Texas. After two Postdoctoral Research appointments and teaching at Illinois Wesleyan University and Eckerd College, he taught and advised research students for 26 years at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC, near Myrtle Beach and retired as Distinguished Professor Emeritus in 2022. His lecture room style included a lot of...
A dual undergraduate major in Chemistry and Saxophone Performance, Professor John G. received his PhD in Inorganic Chemistry at Rice University in Houston, Texas. After two Postdoctoral Research appointments and teaching at Illinois Wesleyan University and Eckerd College, he taught and advised research students for 26 years at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC, near Myrtle Beach and retired as Distinguished Professor Emeritus in 2022. His lecture room style included a lot of one-on-one coaching in problem solving with students working in small groups, and he spent many hours with single students and groups in his office hours and his scheduled exam review sessions. The classroom pedagogies adopted and adapted were the Workshop Chemistry and POGIL (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning models widely used in college science teaching.
His approach to improve student performance in problem solving can be summarized in the acronym PVCOAST that he originated:
* Prepare for the problem by reading and understanding the concepts, definition, equations, terms and models.
* Visualize the problem in an appropriate way using diagrams, chemical equations, chemical structural depictions, etc. that make clear what chemical models apply to the problem.
* Collect the information from the word problems in terms of the model you visualized.
* Organize the information to determine what is known, what needs to be known to answer the problem and what connections are implied.
* Analyze the information based on what you've clarified so far to be able to apply it.
* Solve the problem, clearly detailing how the solution is determined.
* Test the solution. Does it make sense compared to what you thought it would be in magnitude and with units if needed. How does it compare with other example problems? It might be helpful to have another student compare their results.
Application of this approach may seem tedious, but actually helps in solving new problems that are not modeled for you.
