This work in progress describes a WebCT tutorial, "Making Sense of Your Answer," which we have devised to help develop chemistry students' metacognitive skills in problem solving. In the past, much time has been spent on working through chemistry exercises or problems, but research suggests we would be more effective developing metacognitive skills in this area. (Herron, 1996) In our attempts to come to grips with this ongoing problem, we wished particularly to be able to assist our external students. To this end we have developed an on-line tutorial and bulletin board using WebCT. The tutorial consists of a number of modules helping students to strengthen the links between their chemical knowledge and their knowledge of the real world and to improve their estimating skills. We have given emphasis to providing substantial feedback to questions in the quizzes accompanying each module. Students are also encouraged to take the opportunity to reflect on their problem solving skills and share this with other students through a bulletin board as part of the tutorial.

Problem solving schema, developed by many people over the years, all contain a checking step at the end of the problem solving process to determine if the answer found seems reasonable. (Woodcock, 1995) No matter how strongly we exhort our students to do this, we know from experience that many of them do not usually follow this advice. In teaching chemistry students, we often find that they just accept without question the answer that they obtain on their calculators. They do not follow any estimation process to predetermine the approximate answer before calculating and they do not question the size of the answer to see if it is reasonable. Furthermore, experience in the laboratory shows us that they often adopt an unthinking approach to following instructions and calculating results. Often they act as though they have entered some world called "Chemistry," which is entirely cut off from the real world.

We surveyed over 200 students entering first year university chemistry to check their ability to estimate a number of common and chemical quantities. (Hollingworth, 1998) Examples ranged from the volume of a can of Coke, the length, breadth, thickness and mass of a sheet of A4 paper to the melting point of sodium chloride and the diameter of a copper atom. Many of the results showed estimates varying over several orders of magnitude. Estimates of the diameter of a copper atom varies form 10^-27 to 10⁺³⁷nm! We concluded that, if students do not have reasonable estimates of very common quantities, then they will have little hope of checking the reasonableness of their answers to even slightly complex chemical calculations. Clearly, we need to assist students build links between their chemical and real world knowledge. Further, we need to guide them explicitly through answer checking procedures and give them practice at doing this.

Making Sense of Your Answer, while it resembles a normal on-line tutorial in some ways, has a quite different intent in other ways. The tutorial comprises a number of modules including: Introduction to problem solving, Sizes of familiar things, The SI system of measurement, Conversion between units, Estimating sizes of objects, Estimating answers in calculations and Some real problems. Each module contains a brief explanatory section and a multiple choice quiz, which the student answers and receives feedback for immediately on-line. To model the ways to build links between chemical and real world knowledge for our students, we have paid particular attention to providing full explanations about why all possible answers are wrong or right.

We suspect that many of our beginning science students have very little experience at explicitly considering the development of their metacognitive learning skills. Metacognition involves both knowledge of and control of cognition. (Cross and Steadman, 1996) To encourage an awareness of and reflection upon their learning activities, we have provided a bulletin board within the WebCT shell of the tutorial. Here students are asked to comment on their own difficulties, successes and strategies in chemistry problem solving. We expect that these discussions will help our students address weaknesses in the first aspect of metacognition, knowledge of cognition. The second factor, control of cognition, involves such activities as planning, monitoring and regulating learning. Students need to set their own learning goals and test their own learning, but this takes us into the much more general area of academic study skills.

Many of our external students are adult learners, who may be expected to have developed some metacognitive skills in previous academic studies. Some of the external students are entering tertiary education for the first time and so have less developed skills. Most of our internal students are recent school leavers. Our presentation will discuss the different groups of students who have tested the tutorial and their perceptions of it during this year.

References
Cross, K. P. and Steadman, M. H. (1996) Classroom Research, Implementing the Scholarship of Teaching, Jossey-Bass, San Fransisco.

Herron, J. D. (1996) The Chemistry Classroom, Formulas for Successful Teaching, American Chemical Society, Washington.

Hollingworth, R W. (1998) Chemistry Problem Solving and Real World Knowledge, RACI Chemical Education Division National Conference, Bridging the Gap, Rockhampton.

Woodcock, D. (1995) Problem Solving in Chemistry, The A thru E Approach.:
URL http://oksw01.okanagan.bc.ca/chem/probsol/ps_A-E.html