Dr. John W. Moore, a national leader in chemical education who is on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will present the address “Active Learning in Large Lecture Courses” on Friday, Dec. 4, at 4 p.m. in Winants Auditorium of Graves Hall through the Chemistry Seminar lecture series at Hope College. 

The public is invited.  Admission is free.

Moore will explore his emphasis on replacing lectures with active-learning sessions, even within a large program that involves more than 13,000 student enrollments per year.  He will describe his experiences with facilities, methods and teaching assistants, and involving faculty colleagues.

Moore, who edited the Journal of Chemical Education from 1996 through 2009, has advocated placing students in an active rather than passive role for more than 25 years.  He is the W.T. Lippincott Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he directs the Institute for Chemical Education and the ChemEd Digital Library, which focus on providing and disseminating instructional materials in chemistry.  The ChemEd Digital Library was initially an online resource for all National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded chemistry education digital materials for a decade until its transfer to the American Chemical Society (ACS).  His activities also include JCE Software (founder and editor, 1988-96), the New Traditions systemic initiative and serving as a consultant to the ACS Committee on Education for 20 years.

He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and of the ACS, and has won many awards, including the Talbot Prize for Visual Excellence in a Textbook, the James Flack Norris Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Teaching of Chemistry and ACS’s George C. Pimentel Award in Chemical Education.  His publications include five textbooks: one on environmental chemistry, one on chemical kinetics and three on general chemistry.

Moore has spoken at Hope twice before, in 1993 and 1997.  In addition, he served as a graduate-program research mentor for Dr. Justin Shorb, an assistant professor of chemistry at Hope who completed his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011.

Graves Hall is located at 263 College Ave., between 10th and 12th streets.