CPLP: A Chemical Professional Laboratory Program for General Chemistry

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The Chemical Professional Laboratory Program (CPLP) is being initiated at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) as a new mode for writing and teaching general chemistry laboratories. The program teaches chemistry with environments that simulate the experience and workplace of chemical professionals. Assistance is being provided by faculty from professional programs, including engineering, nursing, pharmacy, and laboratory sciences. The program includes four Chicago-area community colleges that are also major sources of UIC professional students. These are the College of DuPage, William Rainey Harper College, Oakton College, and Harold Washington College of the City Colleges of Chicago. Faculty from those schools are consulting with those at UIC on the development of the program, and they are acting as dissemination sites. The laboratories feature one week where general chemistry concepts and techniques are studied in a "normal" manner. In the second and, occasionally, third weeks the students apply these techniques to a procedure that simulates or replicates the environment where a non-chemist might need to use chemistry. Examples include control of blood acidity after a heart attack; development and testing of a new catalyst; and analysis of elemental composition of soil. The program includes an assessment run by a faculty member from the UIC College of Education. The assessment uses qualitative methods, to make it more useful in revising the CPLP lab manual and in learning the response of students to non-traditional procedures in the laboratory.