Guided Inquiry Physical Chemistry Labortory

近年来，为大学化学入门课程开发开放式的、以探究为基础的实验室练习已经付出了广泛的努力。这些努力的一个主要目标是发展学生对化学相互作用的概念性、分子水平的了解。具有讽刺意味的是，正是物理化学最近的进展对这一分子水平的图景做出了重大贡献，然而典型的物理化学实验室练习仍然与几十年前一样。设备的成本只是这次约会的一个原因。另外两个重要原因是缺乏基于前沿问题的实验，以及缺乏运营以探究为基础的实验室的经验。拟议的工作解决了这两个国家的问题。其目标是通过创建一套真实世界的、基于探究的实验来重组物理化学实验室课程，这些实验反映了目前预算不到100万美元的做法。通过专注于几个领域，成本保持在较低水平：材料表面化学、生物化学、环境化学和电化学。材料化学最初似乎是这次任务的一个不同寻常的选择，因为现代表面实验往往极端地利用昂贵的技术。拟议的项目通过采用量子点来规避费用问题：通过吸附、发光、FTIR、光腐蚀和化学衍生法等光谱技术对尖端材料进行检测。这些课程包括一组实验，突出生物化学实验以吸引那些对医学感兴趣的人，环境实验为环境研究的组成部分，以及电化学以吸引工程师。由于目前可用的实验室文本都不支持开放式实验，因此一种可交付的内容是文本。为了将这项工作的成果传播到其他机构，我们建议举办研讨会，为潜在的教师提供具体的经验。这些讲习班的特点是塔夫茨大学的教职员工对母校进行了后续访问。与参与者的这种持续接触预计将大大增加这项工作的传播成功。

In recent years, extensive efforts have been expended to develop open-ended, inquiry-based, laboratory exercises for introductory, college-level chemistry courses. A major goal of these efforts is to develop the student's conceptual, molecular-level picture of chemical interactions. Ironically, it is recent advances in physical chemistry that have made a major contribution to this molecular level picture, yet typical physical chemistry laboratory exercises remain much as they were several decades ago. The cost of the equipment is only one reason for this dating. Two other significant reasons are a scarcity of experiments based on cutting edge problems, and a lack of experience with running an inquiry-based laboratory. The proposed work addresses both of these national problems. The objective is to restructure physical chemistry laboratory courses by creating a set of real-world, inquiry-based experiments that reflect current practice on a less-than-million-dollar budget. Costs are kept modest by focusing on several areas: materials surface chemistry, biochemistry, environmental chemistry, and electrochemistry. Materials chemistry might initially appear to be an unusual choice for this mission since modern surface experiments are often extreme in utilization of expensive techniques. The proposed project circumvents the expense issue by featuring quantum dots: Cutting-edge materials which are examined with spectroscopic techniques such as adsorption, luminescence, FTIR, photocorrosion, and chemical derivatization. The courses are completed with groups of experiments highlighting biochemical experiments to appeal to those with medical interests, environmental experiments for the environmental studies constituent, and electrochemistry to appeal to engineers. Since none of the currently available laboratory texts support open-ended experiments, one deliverable is a text. In order to propagate the results of this work to other institutions, we propose offering workshops to give potential faculty concrete experience. These workshops feature follow-up visits to the home institution by Tufts University faculty. This ongoing contact with participants is expected to substantially increase the success of dissemination of this work.