Modern scientific instrumentation is typically not accessible to rural public secondary schools because of the cost as well as the expertise required to maintain the equipment. Because of the central role that instrumentation now plays in any modern chemical laboratory, students must have access to this equipment in order to gain an accurate and balanced introduction to chemistry. In southwestern Virginia, the majority of high schools do not have the adequate fiscal resources, laboratory equipment, or physical laboratory spaces to properly instruct students in chemistry. Moreover, this lack of adequate laboratories may soon cause some rural schools to lose state accreditation, as the pedagogic effectiveness of all schools within the Commonwealth of Virginia will be evaluated from cumulative scores on the new Standards of Learning Exam (SOL).

The Virginia Tech Chemistry Department, in collaboration with the Virginia Tech College of Human Resources and Education, Julie Grady (Blacksburg High School), and Susanne Dana (Christiansburg High School), is designing an inquiry-based laboratory curriculum that addresses this need. The proposed curriculum is being fashioned in response to new Virginia Chemistry Standards of Learning (SOL). A factor in providing this curriculum is a mobile chemistry laboratory (MCL) which is a 78-foot tractor/transporter that has been specially constructed to house a modern-state-of-the-art facility for 24 laboratory students. Instruments on board the MCL include gas chromatographs (GCs), an infrared spectrometer (FT-IR), ultraviolet-visible spectrophotometers (UV-vis), Geiger-counters, laptop computers, ethernet network, internet access, and Vernier computer interfaces with pH meters and temperature, pressure, and oxygen sensors. This mobile facility is the result of corporate donation, state, and university support.

The objectives of this proposed work concerns the development of the curriculum to be used in the MCL and the training of the high school teachers that have elected to partner with the MCL team in the use of this mobile facility. The curriculum, which is to be fashioned by a team of educators and faculty, will track the suggested academic year SOL guidelines with inquiry-based experiments. The workshop is required to train the high school teachers on the use of the MCL and the experiments of the new curriculum.
In that no equipment is being requested in this proposal, the requests for funds are centered on the development and subsequent evaluation of the curriculum, the summer workshop for the teachers, and partial expenses for the operation of the MCL over the 2000-01 academic year. The workshop is essential in that it will introduce the use of the instruments, as well as the pedagogy for conducting inquiry-based experiments, and for integrating experiments into lecture plans. The information gleaned from students and teachers over in this first year of operation will be used to modify the curriculum and operation of the MCL.

The proposed work will have a significant impact on chemistry education in the secondary school systems. Moreover, it should have a lasting effect upon participating students that matriculate to institutions of higher education for studies in the science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SME&T).