CAPILLARY ELECTROPHORESIS AND HIGH-PERFORMANCE LIQUID

CHROMATOGRAPHY EXPERIMENTS THROUGHOUT THE UNDERGRADUATE

CURRICULUM
Assessment of a Multi-Year, Multi-Course Project
Michelle M. Bushey
In a typical undergraduate chemistry program, students may encounter
sophisticated instrumentation only once or twice in their college careers. When this
happens, the may be left with a narrow imprssion of the capabilities and limitations
of these methods. The Trinity University Chemistry Department recently completed
the assessment phase of a curricular electophoresis (CE) and high-performance
liquid chromatography (HPLC) instrumentation multiple times, in a variety of
chemistry courses, throughout their undegraduate career. Each encounter with the
instruments was designed to address the most critical aspects of the techniques at
appropriate levels while building from previous student experience. The hypothesis
of this project was that students would gain a deeper and more complete
understanding of sophisticated techniques if they had the opportunity to work with
instruments multiple times throughout the undergraduate chemistry curriculum
rather than the case where they would use each instrument only once in an upperdivision course. The challenge is to develop experiments that address the most
important and appropriate curricular aspects for any given course, while at the
same time developing the experience with advanced instrumentation that only can
come from performing multiple and in-depth experiments.
We have developed labs utilizing HPLC and CE that are appropriate for use in
general chemistry, both semesters of organic, analytical, and instrumental courses.
Experiments in lower-division courses, in addition to addressing concepts specific
to these courses, stressed key features of each instrument, and student input into
the experiment design was limited. We relied on autosamplers to address the
throughput of heavily enrolled clases. Lower-division students were able to gain an
introductory knowledge of key analysis techniques they otherwise might never

encounter. These early exposures were incomplete with respect to the particular
instrumental method and only designed to teach the most critical aspects of CE or
HPLC at that particular time. The primary foci of the labs in lower division was to
convey other topics of importance of the class, such as statistical data analysis or
electron donation characteristics of substituents. With this incomplete view of the
instrument, students were then in a stronger position in the upper-division courses
to delve more deeply into the techniques since they could build off the earlier
exposures. With subsequent encounters, the complexity of the experiments
increased, the oportunity for hands-on instrument Access increased, the amount of
student input into the design of the experiments increased, and the concepts were
deepened and broadened. By using the instrumentation in a wide variety of
applications, students who completed the program gained a richer understanding
of the capabilities and limitations of these techniques than they would have after a
single, albeit advanced lab experiment. Stundents did not graduate thinking that
HPLC means only reversed phase analysis of analgesics, but rather that it can be
used to exploit an array of analyte properties for application to a wide range of
different simple types. A similar approach could be implemented for a variety of
other instruments usually encountered by students only in upper-division chemistry
labs.
An assessment phase of the Project involved tracking students perceptions and
understanding as they moved through the curriculum through

the use of

questionnaires that students completed each time they used either the HPLC or
CE instruments in a lab. Student responses were then compiled for those who took
the entire course sequence. The compiled responses were then reviewed both inhouse and by a group of outside experts. The responses have now been evaluated
and they indicate that student understanding and appreciation deepen through
multiple exposures to the same instrument or technique.
We believe that the Project goals were met. Not only did students who completed
all the courses have a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of these two
techniques, but students leaving the course sequence early were exposed to the

two separation methods and left with a reasonable understanding of the most
important features of each technique. A more complete description of the
philosophy, experiments, assessment results, and compiled outside reviewer
comments are provided in the online material.