I'm thinking about using "clickers" to get students to respond to questions during class this fall in my general chemistry section. I'd be interested in hearing from people who have used them and in what ways they were used most successfully.
Yesterday, I went to an outstanding talk by Simon Peyton Jones on how to write a scientific paper. It was directed towards people in CS writing a manuscript for a conference proceedings, but it was still broadly applicable. That got me thinking about other resources on writing research papers and how can we best help students learn to write about their research.
Although I've never done it, I've thought about giving students the opportunity to get hints on exam questions for reduced credit on the question (both 'long answer' and multiple choice). I'm curious to hear if anyone does this in their classes (and why or why not). If you allow students to get hints how do you do this (mechanics) and do you think students learn more by being able to get hints?
Having just gone through "the rules" for balancing redox reactions in my Gen Chem class, I once again am faced with a textbook that does things in a different order than I prefer. When I balance redox reactions, I add electrons at the beginning of the process to balance the change in oxidation state/number of the species being oxidized or reduced. Then, at the end, I can use charge balance as a self-check; if the charge balances itself out, then I probably did everything correctly. My current textbook (and many others), have students go through all the steps (add wa
We have a Junior Qualifying Exam at Reed, which in our department takes the form of an oral exam based on a recent paper from the primary literature for each student. I just finished picking 4 papers for this year's crop of inorganic junior quals. The students have 3 days to learn everything they can about the paper before the oral exam in front of 2 faculty. Several of these choices were inspired by talks I heard at the ACS Salt Lake City meeting.
I use the framework molecular model set by Prentice Hall in my Inorganic class.
I am about to put in my "book" order for the fall and I was wondering if anyone has found a better model set to use in Inorganic chemistry? This set has trigonal pyramid and octahedral geometries.
Kurt