NSF Award
9952313
Chemistry (12) Recent changes in our General Chemistry curriculum are designed to move students away from quantitative, algorithmic problem solving to concept-based problem solving, both in the classroom and the laboratory. The standard lecture format has been supplemented by student-oriented projects which are solved during the classroom period. To coincide with these changes in the classroom part of the course, the laboratory portion has been totally revamped to include discovery-based experiments, in which students learn by performing exercises that help them discover important scientific principles on their own. The students first learn about a concept in this type of laboratory setting, and they then apply their acquired knowledge to solve a problem of interest in real life. Experiments developed by others and reported in the chemical education literature are being adapted to create this new laboratory experience. This project is helping to accomplish these goals by exposing the students to more instrumentation than in the previous laboratory curriculum. In addition, students are using computers to a greater extent, both for molecular modeling as well as data manipulation. In conjunction with the revised course and laboratory format, this project is also incorporating additional instrumentation, including UV-Vis spectrometers, an atomic adsorption spectrometer, an IR spectrometer, and two gas chromatographs, along with computers and software.
