Smart Worksheets and Their Positive Impact on a First-Year Quantitative Chemistry Course

The pandemic was a very difficult time for everyone, as well as teachers and their students. Teachers of first-year quantitative chemistry courses, both during the pandemic and postpandemic, encountered many pandemic-induced difficulties, including inter alia communicating with individual students, providing them with rapid formative feedback, and determining where they were on their learning journey. In addition, two cohorts of students requiring different teaching approaches were enrolled on this course during the period of this study (2020–2023). One cohort had a post-16 mathematics qualification (A-level that includes calculus) and the other, a pre-16 mathematics qualification (GCSE that does not include calculus) as their highest mathematics qualification. In this Article, we show the value of using Smart Worksheets to address these challenges. The Smart Worksheets provided valuable information about the students’ ability to apply mathematical concepts within a chemistry context and, consequently, allowed the teaching team to shape workshops to cater for any application difficulties. Smart Worksheets clearly identified a number of (basic) skills that many of the students were struggling with, including graphing, uncertainty analysis, application of units, and application of logs to buffer calculations. Smart Worksheets also allowed the teaching team to connect with students, to either commend them on their work or ask how they were coping if they appeared to be struggling. Students highlighted how the instant formative feedback provided by Smart Worksheets and their unlimited availability during the course impacted positively on their learning. The Smart Worksheets also helped to identify two subgroups in the student cohort with the higher mathematics qualification; one subgroup could apply their mathematics knowledge within different chemistry contexts while the other subgroup was not able to move from a mathematical context to a chemistry context. This information allowed the teaching team to alter workshop approaches to emphasize translation from one context to another.