RSC HE teaching award winners

By James Berressem2009-09-01T00:00:00

Claire McDonnell is the recipient of the 2009 RSC Education Division's Higher Education Teaching Award and Stuart Bennett is the first recipient of the RSC's new Education Award

Claire McDonnell is the recipient of the 2009 RSC Education Division's Higher Education Teaching Award. The award acknowledges her contribution to developing approaches to teaching and learning chemistry that support, motivate and engage students, in particular any students who start DIT chemical science courses with no chemistry post-16. The aim of the award is to identify excellent HE chemistry teachers and disseminate good practice in teaching. Claire receives £2000, a medal and a certificate.

McDonnell joined DIT's school of chemical and pharmaceutical sciences in 2000, after four years working in industry. When she started teaching the pass rate for first-year students was poor. To address this McDonnell, working with colleagues in the DIT Chemistry Education Research Team, has introduced several innovations in the teaching and learning of the chemical sciences at DIT. Weekly tutorials are now run as problem-solving workshops to involve students in more active, small group learning and students test and improve their understanding of course material by completing online self-study quizzes, hosted on a virtual learning environment developed by McDonnell and Dr Christine O'Connor.

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