In an effort to increase student comprehension and retention of basic chemistry concepts within a college level general chemistry course, a series of activities were created. These activities are referred to here as integrated problems. They were developed to help students by continuously reviewing key concepts and incorporating new material into…

An underlying goal in most chemistry curricula is to enable students to think like chemists, yet there is much evidence to suggest that students can learn to solve problems without thinking conceptually like a chemist. There are few tools, however, that assess whether students are learning to think like Ph.D. faculty, putative experts in the…

A series of pedagogical problem set exercises are posed that illustrate the principles behind material efficiency green metrics and their application in developing a deeper understanding of reaction and synthesis plan analysis and strategies to optimize them. Rigorous, yet simple, mathematical proofs are given for some of the fundamental concepts,…

Problem solving is a highly valued skill in chemistry. Courses within this discipline place a substantial emphasis on problem-solving performance and tend to weigh such performance heavily in assessments of learning. Researchers have dedicated considerable effort investigating individual factors that influence problem-solving performance. The…

This article describes the development and implementation of an open-access organic chemistry question bank for online tutorials and assessments at University College Cork and Dublin Institute of Technology. SOCOT (structure-based organic chemistry online tutorials) may be used to supplement traditional small-group tutorials, thereby allowing…

This paper summarizes difficulties that chemistry students at all levels commonly exhibit when translating, manipulating, and interpreting mathematical expressions that contain logarithms, and offers approaches that the authors have found useful to help students overcome such difficulties. The online supplement provides problem sets created by the…

Describes the electronic homework system that provides individual students with a disk of programs that they can use to generate personalized problem sets. Discusses the advantages of this approach and the nature of computerized problems. (JRH)

Two exam questions are presented. One suitable for advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate courses in organic chemistry, is on equivalent expressions for the description of several pericyclic reactions. The second, for general chemistry students, asks for an estimation of the rate of decay of a million-year-old Uranium-238 sample. (BB)

Contains a set of questions (plus possible, but certainly not uniquely satisfactory, answers) requiring no more than a concurrent first-year, college level course, a data handbook, and a willingness to apply fundamental chemical ideas to the systems which surround us. (Author/TS)

Presents four questions (and provides answers) related to biology and chemistry. Items are concerned with genes, sodium transport, osmosis, and early earth history. (RH)

Presents five questions with answers regarding chemistry and living systems and ecology. (RH)

Presents questions and answers pertaining to yeast fermentation, oxygen content of the air, nutritional requirements of hot water bacteria, the hydrolysis of acetyl coenzyme A, and the stratified distribution of life in the Black Sea. (MLH)