Introductory Chemistry: A Guided Inquiry

Kendall Hunt is excited to partner with The POGIL Project to publish materials in a variety of disciplines that are designed for use in active learning, student-centered classrooms.

POGIL is an acronym for Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning. Because POGIL is a student-centered instructional approach, in a typical POGIL classroom or laboratory, students work in small teams with the instructor acting as a facilitator. The student teams use specially designed activities that generally follow a learning cycle paradigm. These activities are designed to have three key characteristics:

• They are designed for use with self-managed teams that employ the instructor as a facilitator of learning rather than a source of information.
• They guide students through an exploration to construct understanding.
• They use discipline content to facilitate the development of important process skills, including higher-level thinking and the ability to learn and to apply knowledge in new contexts. 

For more information, please visit www.pogil.org

Michael P. Garoutte received his B.S. in Chemistry from Missouri Southern State College in 1989, and his Ph. D. from the University of Kansas in 1995. His doctoral work was done under the supervision of Richard Schowen, and involved mechanistic studies of proton transfer in serine proteases. After a year teaching at Mercer University and a year at the University of Central Oklahoma, Garoutte took a position at his alma mater (now known as MSSU) in 1997. He teaches a one-semester general-organic-biological chemistry course (for allied health majors), organic chemistry, instrumental analysis, and computer applications in chemistry, and directs student research. After being introduced to Calibrated Peer Review at UCLA in 2001, Garoutte served as a facilitator for CPR and the Molecular Science project at several Multi-Initiative Dissemination Project workshops. The overwhelming community of support for curriculum reform in chemistry at these workshops encouraged him to adopt POGIL in his allied health and organic chemistry courses. He developed a set of POGIL-like guided-inquiry activities for the allied health (GOB) chemistry course, published in 2007 (Wiley) and continues to be active in the project.

Ashley Mahoney is the Associate Chair and Professor of Chemistry at Bethel University in St. Paul, MN where she has taught for 17 years. She began using POGIL pedagogy in the Fall of 2002. She has helped facilitate over 25 workshops across the country in addition to being the POGIL regional coordinator for the North Central Region. Mahoney has co-authored a collection of POGIL activities for the GOB (allied health) classroom available through Wiley. She has also assembled a national consortium of faculty to write inquiry laboratories for introductory chemistry courses. Her current research focuses on increasing metacognitive awareness in introductory level students to improve success in the course.