CAS CONNECT 2015

20 For his efforts on that initiative, the AP chemistry board invited Gelder to participate as a reader during a seven-day summer meeting where the essay portions for AP chemistry tests were graded. After participating as a reader for more than a decade, Gelder served as chief reader from 2002-2005. The chief reader ensures the exams are graded according to a rubric he or she has developed. “So from the chief reader to the ques- tion leaders to the table leaders and then to the readers, it’s a wonderful top-down scheme,” Gelder says. “I’ve had experi- ence in all the different levels of grading the AP chemistry exam.” Gelder was learning from the hundreds of high school and college teachers who were coming in to help grade the exams, and he was getting feedback through the grading process. He could identify patterns of error within the responses, learning more about students’ misun- derstandings of chemistry concepts and taking that information back to the teachers. Apart from working with AP chemis- try exams, in the late ’90s, Gelder also began working in summer workshops for AP chemistry teachers in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, Indiana, Kansas and Louisiana. He also does consultant work in high schools across the nation from Massachusetts to Alaska. The teaching, training and consulting keeps him busy, but a few years ago, he took on a new challenge. In 2012, the College Board, the orga- nization that provides resources such as AP classes and testing for high school students, created a new curriculum that focused more on inquiry-based approaches. All AP chemistry teachers had to submit a course syllabus that met the College Board’s criteria versus any less strict district or state guidelines. Gelder was a huge proponent of using computer technology in teaching chemis- try, having worked on chemical education software dating back to early Apple I and II computers. He thought he’d be able to help the AP chemistry teachers develop programs to use in their classrooms that would meet the new criteria. “I use the computer in as many differ- ent ways possible both inside and outside the classroom,” Gelder says. “We had already been using inquiry-based approaches in our chemistry classes at OSU; now we just had to figure out how to make activities that would be relevant in a high school classroom.” For the project, he reached out to Dr. Michael Abraham at the University of Oklahoma, who was also interested in developing computer-based learning programs. The two began working with OSU student programmer Kirk Haines to develop a series of JAVA-simulated computer-based molecular laboratory experiments that students could view via Internet browsers. Haines wrote the soft- ware for the graphics while Gelder and Abraham wrote the activities.