I received an email response to that editorial from Dick Ramette, who suggested that there should be a conference to come up with ideas for increasing K_eq. Dick's email also contained the title of this editorial. He pointed out that over the years this Journal has printed many accounts of how teaching could be improved, but very few of them dealt with the fundamental issue: how to make it clear to students that their learning, not our teaching, is the most important aspect of our courses. We need to get across the idea that nobody can learn for anyone else-people have to learn for themselves.

Juxtaposed with Dick's email in my file of ideas for editorials was the 1966 edition of a booklet titled Catalysts of a Profession, which was published by the Manufacturing Chemists' Association (now the Chemical Manufacturers Association). In that year Dick Ramette, Tom Lippincott, and Leonard Nash received MCA's College Chemistry Teacher Awardsdefinitely a vintage year! The booklet contained an essay by Nash titled "Concerning Teachees", which was based on his address as spokesperson for the 1966 award recipients. Nash pointed out that "To put one's students in a learning situation, one must somehow get them engaged in inquiry. For this purpose good questions are far more effective than good answers."

According to Nash, getting students "engaged in inquiry" is not a trivial undertaking. It may well be even more difficult today than it was in 1966. Certainly students are exposed to a much wider variety of distractions now than then. And students' reasons for taking a chemistry course probably span a much greater range. How then do we get them engaged? Nash developed the idea that the most effective thing a teacher can do is to be an example of what it means to be a scientist. In the presence of students, teachers should demonstrate commitment and enthusiasm for their subject, ask questions of nature and obtain answers, think logically and with clarity, and respect and encourage their students' potential ability to engage in scientific inquiry.

Though I am certain that he was an exemplar of Nash's approach, Ramette espoused a different one. To help students ask questions and find answers for themselves, he designed computer programs that can present a broad range of problems in a specific area, encourage students to think about how to address the problems, and then provide feedback on their approach. I have used two of these, KinWORKS and REACT, for the past half dozen years and find them quite effective. Both are available from JCE Software.

There are many other approaches to engaging students actively in the learning process. The NSF has funded five
systemic chemistry projects, and all of them have developed active-learning methods. New Traditions (http://newtraditions.chem.wisc.edu/) has an array of techniques ranging from ConcepTests in lectures and Challenge Problems for small-group work, through inquiry-based laboratories, to lecture-less courses in which students spend most of their class time working on problems that have been carefully designed to lead them to develop new insights. ChemLinks (http://chemlinks.beloit.edu/) and Modular Chemistry Consortium (http://mc2.cchem.berkeley.edu/) are jointly developing thematic modules in which students learn chemical principles by studying a real-world problem such as how to make a blue LED, or what it takes to make an automobile air bag.

The Workshop Chemistry project (http://www.sci.ccny.cuny.edu/~chemwksp/) involves students in small-group workshops led by peer instructors who have only recently completed the course of which the workshop is a part. The Molecular Science project (http://server2.nslc.ucla.edu/ms/) is applying information technology to allow students to explore data bases of real chemical information and to encourage and evaluate writing on scientific topics by students. A number of other institutions are affiliated with these projects as adapt/adopt partners and as a result of dissemination workshops, and there are many other efforts under way that focus on student learning rather than faculty teaching. I am certain that there are many more such efforts within the U.S. and elsewhere.

As an academic year ends, it is useful for each of us to reflect on what we have done to engage students, and to resolve to do so more effectively next year. How can we encourage students to learn? How can we start them on the path toward responsibility for their own learning? How can we make them better students-not just in our classes, but throughout their lives? Readers who have answers to these questions, partial answers, or even inklings of how to begin to find answers are encouraged to communicate them through these pages.