Undergraduate chemistry curriculum

The revitalization of chemistry education has received much recent attention and taken many forms. Modes of teaching, textbooks, laboratory instruction— all aspects of the chemistry curriculum have undergone scrutiny for reform. A recent National Science Foundation report, Shaping the Future New Expectations for Undergraduate Education in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology characterizes the nature of the most successful curricular and pedagogical improvements ... 

Lehmpuhl DW (2003) Incorporating scanning probe microscopy into the undergraduate chemistry curriculum. J Chem Fiduc 80 478-479... 

Incorporating Nuclear Chemistry as an Education Tool in the Undergraduate Chemistry Curriculum... 

Hehre WJ, Nelson JE. Introducing Molecular Modeling into the Undergraduate Chemistry Curriculum. Irvine, CA Wavefunction, Inc., 1997. 

Practice in Education (CASPiE) program in Chapter 10. These modules provide first- and second-year students with access to research experiences as part of the mainstream general and organic chemistry curriculum create a collaborative research group environment for students in the laboratory provide access to advanced instrumentation for all members of the collaborative to be used for undergraduate research experiences and create a research experience that is engaging for women and for ethnic minorities and appropriate for use at various types of institutions, including those with diverse populations. 

Isai T. Urasa, Hampton University I just want to underscore what Robert Lichter just said about the quality chemistry curriculum that has been implemented at the undergraduate institutions. Even before we can draw up success stories, there are a lot of stories out there that are ongoing, both in the instructional process as well as in undergraduate research that we have identified as being very important. 

Werner T C (1986) Reflections on the emphasis of communication skills I the undergraduate chemistry curriculum. J Chem Ed 63 140-141... 

Molecular UV-vis spectroscopy is prevalent in the more advanced chemistry curriculum for undergraduates. It appears in Organic Chemistry in the analysis of organic compounds, and it can also be applied to Physical (or Quantum) Chemistry courses in discussions of molecular orbitals, electronic transitions between these orbitals, and also transition selection rules and microstates. It is also relevant to Inorganic Chemistry, as it is investigated in terms of transition metal complex color, crystal field theory, and molecular orbital diagrams and electronic transitions for a variety of inorganic compounds. 

So the bad news is that we don t know about the toxicological properties of >99% of the known compounds. The good news is that for most of the chemicals you will encounter in an undergraduate chemistry curriculum, we have at least some toxicological data. Thus, for most of the chemicals that you are likely to use as a student, you can learn about their health effects. 

Many undergraduate science majors take on academic-year or summertime research projects at their home institutions, at other colleges or universities, or at some chemical industry location in the form of an internship. These are valuable experiences since they allow students to experience both the joys and frustrations of cutting-edge research. Working in a research lab is often a very different experience from performing academic lab experiments that are associated with courses in a chemistry curriculum. Many new hazards can be encountered and the level of supervision can vary considerably in comparison to lab courses, where experiments have been pretested, hazards are well known, and supervision is constant. 

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