The way we teach often overemphasizes details so that students cannot see the forest for the trees. As a consequence, students generally don’t retain much of the knowledge that they acquired in previous courses. They also struggle with transferring that knowledge to real-life situations.

The use of the big ideas in the discipline might help students overcome these hurdles. Big ideas are the core concepts of a subject. They are the most important takeaways from a course, and they need to be uncovered to help students construct their knowledge more effectively. Rather than merely covering the course content, active learning strategies aim to uncover it by using the big ideas in the field as a scaffold.

In the Art & Science Project, students are requested to produce an artistic visual work and a written report explaining the rationale for its creation. It could be a painting, drawing, collage, video clip, etc. The work should explore some of the nine big ideas in chemistry as proposed by Peter Atkins.

Atkins developed the appealing idea that there are only nine “big ideas” in chemistry. These nine are the core concepts that students must master to be able to understand what chemistry is all about.

Atkins’s big ideas in Chemistry^*

1. Matter is made of atoms
2. Elements display periodicity
3. Chemical bonds form when electrons pair
4. Molecular shape is a crucial feature in chemistry
5. There are residual forces between molecules
6. Energy is conserved
7. Entropy tends to increase
8. There are barriers to reaction
9. There are only four types of reaction

^* Atkins’s original article can be retrieved from here.

In short: The use of big ideas can help students retain knowledge and construct meaning for themselves, allowing them to perceive not only the trees but also how the forest emerges from them.