Instrumentation for a Guided Discovery Approach to General Chemistry

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In a two-semester laboratory sequence students are guided to rediscover the basic principles of chemistry. Instead of first learning theories in lecture and verifying the principles in the laboratory, students make laboratory observations and cases each student preforms experiments under slightly different conditions and the class results are entered into a PC, graphed and displayed by the instructor. Students participate as a group in the discussion of the results and in some cases are able to return immediately to the laboratory and test the predictive power of their hypotheses. Modern, rapid-scanning spectrometers and chromatographs are a central feature of the discovery laboratory process. These allow large numbers of students to discover concepts which are usually not considered in the general chemistry laboratory. In addition, certain classical general chemistry experiments are made more efficient through use of this modern instrumentation thus making it possible for students to gather more data in a single period thereby maximizing the amount of data available and still leaving time for group discussions of the trends. The institution is matching the NSF grant with an equal amount of funds.