DOI
https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.0c00627

Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed many aspects of our world including the way we teach chemistry. Our emergence from the pandemic provides an opportunity for deep reflection and intentional action about what we teach, and why, as well as how we facilitate student learning. Focusing on foundational postsecondary chemistry courses, we suggest that we cannot simply return to "normal” practice but need to design and implement new ways of teaching and learning based on fundamentally reimagined learning outcomes for our courses that equip students for life after the rupture they have experienced. We recommend that new learning objectives should be guided both by an analysis of existing global challenges and the types of understandings and practices needed to confront them, and by research-based frameworks that provide insights into important areas of knowledge, skill, and attitude development. We identify a core set of competencies along three major dimensions (crosscutting reasoning, core understandings, and fundamental practices) that we believe should guide the design, implementation, and evaluation of chemistry curricula, teaching practices, and assessments in foundational courses for science and engineering majors. The proposed framework adopts systems thinking as the underpinning form of reasoning that students should develop to analyze and comprehend complex global systems and phenomena.

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
Chemistry curriculum must be connected to the current problems and challenges that modern societies face. It must be more question-driven than knowledge-driven. The new curriculum should be designed to prepare critical and more independent learners that can search for, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate qualitative and quantitative data about relevant systems and use it to predict, explain, and argue about their properties, behaviors, and impacts, both within and beyond the realm of chemistry. That would demand meaningful integration with concepts and ideas from other disciplines. It is necessary to revamp our chemistry curricula, pedagogical practices, and assessment tools to shift the focus of attention from the development of pieces of knowledge to the construction of mindsets that help understand and investigate complex systems.
Systems thinking is the underpinning form of reasoning that students should develop to analyze and comprehend complex global systems and phenomena.

Point of Strength
The new curriculum should be more question-driven than knowledge-driven.