Chemical education laboratory work

Chemistry is basically an experimental science, hence the contact, especially through the laboratory and practical work, with concrete examples of substances, their reactions and other properties, is an essential and integral part of chemical education. The laboratory is therefore the proper place for keeping chemistry tangible. 

Tsaparlis and Gorezi (2005,2007) have proposed the addition of a project-based component to a conventional expository physical chemistry laboratory. Project-type tasks were used, mainly taken from articles in the Journal of Chemical Education. Dming the performance of the project experiments, students were dedicated, patient and enthusiastic. The writing of the report and the oral presentation of the project were very demanding tasks. The evaluation of the work by the students through... 

Shilandd, T. W. (1999). Constructivism The implications for laboratory work. Journal of Chemical Education, 76, 107-109. 

Accepting the facts that the conventional expository laboratory has many problems associated with it, as well as that it is not an easy task to replace it entirely with inquiry-type practical work, Tsaparlis and Gorezi (141) proposed a modification of a conventional, one-semester, expository physical chemistry laboratory to accommodate a project-based component. Eight project-type tasks were used, mostly taken from articles in the Journal of Chemical Education, which is a rich source. The conventional experiments remained intact in this approach, being simply enriched with the project-based component. Students working cooperatively carried out both the conventional and the project parts in pairs for the conventional experiments, in groups of four for the project work. 

However, there were some notable lacunae that need to be addressed. Little work has been done in chemical education research on the physical chemistry laboratory, although what has been done is both valuable and excellent. In addition, little attention has been paid to the issue of the structure of the physical chemistry laboratory as a whole (or at least little has been published). More needs to be done in this area. Very few of the experiments included a clear pedagogical objective, and those that did, failed to do any assessment of those objectives. It is hoped that a continuously increasing percentage of new experiments will include these elements. 

These successes, the relatively low cost of electricity and especially the environmental advantages that electrochemical methods afford, justify the wider evaluation of electrochemistry as a first-line technology for oxidations and reductions in chemical process development work. Today, the only factors standing in the way of this are the lack of some education in the practical applications of electrochemistry, management encouragement to reach out to university chemistry departments, as well as to specialist industrial companies, working in the field, and the availability of an electrochemical cell in chemical process development laboratories everywhere. Regarding electrochemical cells, the reader is referred to the Lund and Baizer book... 

Go to http //chemistry.brookscole.com/skoogfac/. From the Chapter Resources menu, choose Web Works, and locate the Chapter 17 section, where you will find links to several good educational sites that give additional help on complexation equilibria and complexometric titrations. Several Web sites describe experiments that can be done in the laboratory based on complexation methods. Find the abstract of the paper from the Journal of Chemical Education that deals with the determination of zinc by EDTA titration. Find the indicator and the buffer pH used in the titration. There is also a link to additional information on chemistry applied to aquatic systems. Compare some of the complexation equilibria described in these documents to those discussed in this chapter. 

Laboratory work is an essential component of chemical education. However, schools in most developing countries are ill equipped for practical work, and even where laboratories have been built the problems of servicing the laboratory as well as equipment are more acute. The basic problem is of funding the purchase of consumables and equipment, together with the associated maintenance cost. 

Kenkel has been the Principal Investigator for a series of curriculum development project grants funded by the National Science Foundation s Advanced Technological Education Program. A textbook (Chemistry An Industry-Based Introduction) and this manual (Chemistry An Industry-Based Laboratory Manual) were produced under these grants. He also has authored or coauthored four articles on the curriculum work in recent issues of the Journal of Chemical Education and has presented this work at more than a dozen conferences since 1994. 

Le Bel was born into a wealthy family that controlled the petroleum industry in Pechelbronn, Alsace. In 1865 he was sent to the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris to obtain a chemical education and spent most of his time there doing chemical research. After graduation, he worked with the French chemists Antoine Balard and Adolphe Wurtz in Paris, in between intermediate periods of refinery construction at home. Finally in 1889, he sold his shares in the family business and established a private laboratory in Paris where he devoted himself to organic chemistry and, in his later years, paleontology, botany, and philosophy. An independent thinker who never held an academic appointment, Le Bel did manage to achieve general recognition as a chemist and even became president of the French Chemical Society in 1892. 

Whilst models and modelling bring history and philosophy of chemistry together, the construction and testing of these takes place in the laboratory. This provides the justification for Chapter 4, which focuses on laboratory work in general in chemical education. Research into the historical evolution of laboratory work at both secondary and tertiary level is reviewed. It is concluded that, because the purposes for laboratory work have historically been ill-defined, research into its effectiveness has inevitably been inconclusive. Two alternatives from this conclusion are discussed that laboratory work in chemical education should be abandoned as an historical anachronism that it should be reformed. Following the more positive line. 

Martin J. Goedhart is currently Associate Professor in chemical education at the Amsterdam Mathematics, Science and Technology Education Laboratory (AMSTEL) of the Uitiversity of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He has experience in teaching chemistry in vocational schools and at universities. He is presently involved in the traiiting of chemistry teachers and in research in science education. His research work is maiitiy directed to conceptual development in chentistry, both at the upper secondary and the university levels. 

While chemical analysis in works laboratories was mostly done by individuals employed by the industry, circumstances around 1900 led to the appearance of a new type of intermediary between science and industry, the consultant. He usually worked in independent technical-chemical bureaus, was temporarily hired by industry, and often educated as a chemical engineer, sometimes in Germany, more often at the Royal Institute of Technology. Stockholm superfosfat engaged, but did not employ on a regular basis, academic chemists as consultants. Among these were such well-known scientists as Klason, Nilson and Svante Arrhenius. 

More than any other researcher in a department of chemistry, the scholarly work of the chemical education researcher will be influenced by both the research and educational missions of the department and of the institution. The research mission of the department will have an impact on the expectations that will exist for scholarly work in the area of chemical education. It is not fair to oversimplify the situation by saying that institutions with less research emphasis will expect less research from a chemical education researcher and those with a heavy research emphasis will expect more. Indeed, many departments with a heavy research emphasis do not consider their chemical education researchers to be researchers in chemistry, and in some cases do not expect them to be. For example, there are institutions who hire a specialist in chemical education to direct a large undergraduate education program, sometimes consisting of many hundreds of students who will be enrolled in first and second year chemistry courses with laboratory components. Likewise, smaller institutions, where there is less traditional chemistry research, may be interested in emphasizing research... 

In the second half of the nineteenth century chemical education was modernized under the influence of Justus von Liebig. Josef Redtenbacher in Prague and Vienna and Anton Schrotter in Graz and Vienna introduced in Austria Liebig s modern method of chemical education based on the laboratory work of all students. New chairs of chemistry were installed at universities and polytechnic institutes after the revolution of 1848. The organization of studies was reformed between 1849 and 1870. A third line of chemical education at a secondary level was established by the foundation of Gewerbeschulen (technical secondary schools for chemistry). 

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