Loretta Lucek Jones, D.A., Ph.D.

• Professor
• Chemistry and Biochemistry Program
• Greeley, Colorado 80639
• Office: (970) 351-1443
• Fax: (970) 351-2533
• E-mail: Loretta.Jones@unco.edu

Professor Jones earned a bachelor's degree in honors chemistry at Loyola University, Chicago, and a masters degree in chemistry at the University of Chicago. For nine years she worked at Argonne National Laboratory and in industry. She then went on to the University of Illinois at Chicago to earn her Ph.D. in physical chemistry. At the same time she earned a D.A. in chemistry, a preparation for teaching and educational research and development at the college level. She taught general chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for 13 years and has been at the University of Northern Colorado since 1992. Dr. Jones loves nature and hiking, but actually spends more time reading mysteries and science fiction.

Activities and Research

Prof. Jones' research area is Chemical Education. Her interests involve the optimization of learning environments for chemistry; they focus primarily on active involvement of students in their learning, the applications of advanced technologies to the teaching of chemistry and visual representations of complex phenomena. She is currently conducting research on how students learn from animations. She was co-principal investigator of the Rocky Mountain Teacher Education Collaborative, a coalition of six Colorado schools involved in improving the education of mathematics and science teachers. She was also the principal investigator of ChemDiscovery: Chemistry for the Information Age (formerly ChemQuest), an NSF-funded project for the development of a web/CD-ROM hybrid learning environment for high school chemistry. She has written two general chemistry textbooks with Peter Atkins, Chemistry: Molecules, Matter and Change and Chemical Principles, and developed the interactive multimedia CD-ROM Exploring Chemistry with Stanley Smith and Steve Gammon. She also worked with Roy Tasker and others to create the Bridging to the Lab web-delivered laboratory simulations.

Sample Publications

• Agapova, O., Jones, L., Ushakov, A., Ratcliffe, A., and Varanka Martin, M.  (2002). Encouraging independent chemistry learning through multimedia design experiences, Chemistry Education International, 3, No. 1.
• Jones, L. L. (1999). Learning chemistry through design and construction, UniServe Science News, 14, November, 3-7.
• Jones, L. L. (1996). The role of molecular structure and modeling in general chemistry, New Initiatives in Chemical Education, Summer, 1996.
• Jones, L. L. & Smith, S. G. (1991). The acid test: Five years of multimedia chemistry, Technological Horizons in Education Journal, IBM Multimedia Supplement, 21-23.

Links

• American Chemical Society Division of Chemical Education
• Molecular Visualization Workshop
• Gordon Research Conference on Science Education and Visualization: International