Authenticity-Driven Design of a High-Enrollment Organic Laboratory Course

We have developed a curriculum for the organic chemistry laboratory in which students draw on authentic usage of spectroscopy, spectrometry, and computational chemistry to explain chemical phenomena. This curriculum, which has been continuously refined over a decade, has been explored by many thousands of students and is scalable to small and large institutions. Herein, we articulate our design philosophy of engaging students in explaining chemical phenomena using authentic data and describe how this philosophy informs our curricular choices. We present an overview of the entire curricular system that includes well-scaffolded activities to support student learning throughout course activities, including laboratory assessments and written exams. To assess the extent to which our course materials align with our goals, we analyzed those materials through the lens of three-dimensional learning. Our laboratory assessments and written exams are highly 3D (∼20–30%) and emphasize the science and engineering practice of analyzing and interpreting data (∼50–60%). We demonstrate that it is possible to have a highly 3D laboratory curriculum that supports students in a high enrollment course (>500 students/term). Future work will explore how students experience these 3D tasks that require them to analyze and use multiple sources of data to construct explanations for chemical phenomena.