“Learning something” can be done at different levels of meaningfulness and understanding.

Operational Learning: As the name suggests, we can operate something but potentially have no understanding at all. Driving a car is almost purely operational, as knowing almost nothing about how it operates, beyond “needs fuel and inflated tires” is necessary. For the last 50 years, if you needed to know the result from “12.4 x 1.9,” you could, in principle, operate a calculator and obtain a result and have no clue what multiplication was or how to even casually assess the result (i.e., it ought to be about 24). Arguably, operational ability can take place with no understanding of the underlying principles whatsoever. Within the limits of the calculator, there is no multiplication question that cannot be answered; yet the sensibility and rationality of the answer cannot be assessed whatsoever and the user can have no understanding of multiplication whatsoever. Using “Google Translate” is the same thing.

Surface Learning: When we see a stimulus, we use the information we have at our disposal or in our experience to react. If you know the multiplication table through the 12s, then there are 78 different items (provided you know that “4 x 5” means the same as “5 x 4”). With this grid, you can begin to see a lot more of the pattern underlying multiplication than you can with a calculator, but you still do not necessarily need to understand multiplication at all as long as you are only asked for one of the 78 results that you know. The “6 x 9” stimulus results in “72” – but if you needed to do “12.4 x 1.9” you would not have a clue about what to do, but at least you might well be able to estimate the result as being close to “12 x 2,” if only by analogy.

Despite the ability to generate replies, neither the operational nor surface learning represents meaningful learning about multiplication. People with operational knowledge can generate answers, provided there is power to the calculator and the keystrokes are done correctly, but they can do so with zero understanding about the subject. Things are better and worse for the people with surface knowledge. They see patterns and can make extrapolations and estimations, but the least bit of difference from the factoids they’ve memorized and they are unable to answer at all.

Meaningful Learning: By relying on useful information that you gather by many methods, including operational and surface learning, and then having principles to connect and integrate ideas with your existing knowledge, you create meaning. Among other things, meaningful learning not only allows you to deal with new and unfamiliar situations, but also allows you to explain and defend your ideas to others.

There are things in your life that you have truly learned to a degree of mastery. The most familiar of these things are physical, such as a sport, or creative, such as something in the arts (music, dance, representation, theater), or strategic, such as gaming. Whatever it is that you have developed skills for, you understand meaningful learning. You have done it. And you did it through good decision-making: engagement, distraction-free environments, practice, communication with others, trying things out and keeping what worked and rejecting what did not, and so on.

Because organic chemistry is an actual area of study, and not a manufactured topic for teaching an introduction, the subject can be taught and tested with meaningfulness in mind. At the University of Michigan, this approach is what we have in mind for CHEM 210 and CHEM 215. It’s a choice. Teaching and testing anything could be done operationally or with surface learning in mind; but we do not elect to do either of those.

To be critical for a moment, however, systems of education in the United States are extremely variable and barely subject to oversight, consistency, and/or quality control. The skills related to learning in the sciences that you arrive with when you begin CHEM 210 are going to reflect whatever were the abilities and skills of your own past teachers, the choices you made and the habits you developed.

And while a little bit of subject matter background is critical for starting CHEM 210, it is frankly not that much. What matters more, in all likelihood, are the learning skills that you associate with learning science that you have when you walk in the door, as well as your ability to make good decisions when you have been given autonomy.

As instructors, our dream is to inspire you to develop and enhance your meaningful learning skills and apply them to your academic learning in organic chemistry. Our nightmare is that all we are doing is sorting on the skills you enter with, and that another core feature of humans, the deeply set resistance to change, prevents some students from moving past their prior experiences with the sciences.

How to best tell about your past experiences in the sciences?

Look to testing.

If your tests have been geared towards the memorization, recall, and recognition of factoids, then that is indicative of a surface learning environment. If grinding numbers through equations or simple pattern recognition with no processing has been the goal, then the demands were more operational in nature.

Always remember that you have entered with experiences in meaningful learning (sports, music, etc.), and if you have not had these expectations in your academic learning, you can adapt and use these other experiences to build upon.

But if this is necessary, you will need to make real change.

Essay 1: You have autonomy
Essay 2: The learning skills you enter with
Essay 3: Post-COVID dialed up autonomy
Essay 4: Resources and their useful use
Essay 5: Practice explanation: Control over when you make errors
Essay 6: Testing: It’s called performance for a reason
Essay 7: Transformational Learning: Resistance is Futile
Essay 8: Grading: Scales are good; curves are bad.