Physical chemistry curriculum

When Ostwald, Arrhenius, and van t Hoff announced their founding of a discipline of physical chemistry that deserved official recognition in the university curriculum and in distinctive scientific societies and journals, they defined physical chemistry as a borderline discipline but nonetheless as chemistry. 

We point the reader to numerous sources to find information on using molecular mechanics and ab initio calculations in the physical chemistry curriculum. First, Warren Hehre, who presented a talk at the symposium but did not author a chapter for this book, has written a comprehensive description of molecular mechanics and ab initio calculations. (9) An example of using computational chemistry to understand the role of chlorine oxides in stratospheric chemistry can be found in the Journal of Chemical Education. (10) Also, several workbooks are available with computational chemistry exercises for students to carry out. (11-13)... 

Schwenz, R. W. Moore, R. J. Physical Chemistry Developing a Dynamic Curriculum-, American Chemical Society Washington, DC, 1993. 

Student preparation is clearly important. The placement of physical chemistry late in the curriculum is most often justified by the argument that the... 

CHED Symposium Whither goest physical chemistry What is new for incorporating into the curriculum, American Chemistry Society National Meeting, San Diego, March 2005. 

The predecessor of this volume appeared in 1993, and covers a variety of topics. (7) The present volume also contains various schemes for improving the physical chemistry curriculum, as well as new suggestions for the laboratory portion of the course. There have been other workshops and meetings, including a workshop on curricular developments in the analytical sciences sponsored by the NSF and chaired by Prof. Ted Kuwana of the University of Kansas. (2) You, the teacher of physical chemistry must decide how to apply this large amount of information and the physical chemistry knowledge that you already possess. You should make these decisions consciously, based on the situation that you face and on your goals and objectives for the course. This essay is primarily an attempt by a retired professor of physical chemistry to comment on some of the decisions he has made in a career of four decades. 

Integrating Research and Education to Create a Dynamic Physical Chemistry Curriculum... 

Ultimately, the integration of research and education is a community responsibility that can benefit from broad participation of faculty and co-workers at a variety of stages of professional development. With its broad and fundamental sweep, physical chemistry is an excellent platform for such an effort. The inclusion of examples from other disciplines and multidisciplinary fields like nanotechnology can enrich the physical chemistry curriculum and keep it perennially fresh and exciting for both instructors and students. 

We are taught in business school (I am told) that every challenge is an opportunity. That is probably untrue in physical chemistry (and perhaps in commerce too), but there are certainly opportunities for us to enhance our teaching. I have identified three principal ones in Fig.lb, namely graphics, curriculum reform, and the conceptual basis of our subject. As for challenges, no opportunity is an island, and I like to think that the triangle summarizes the interplay between them and the strength that they acquire in combination. 

In 1993 Richard W. Schwenz and Robert J. Moore published a book, under the auspices of the American Chemical Society, entitled Physical Chemistry Developing a Dynamic Curriculum (/). This book followed a 1988 project by the Pew Mid-Atlantic Cluster on revision of the physical chemistry laboratory curriculum, and NSF funded workshops in 1990 and 1991 on physical chemistry curriculum development. Together they called for substantial changes in the content of the physical chemistry lab. 

Some readers may wonder at the inclusion of NMR under the rubric of modem instrumentation. After all, NMR spectroscopy has been a part of the curriculum in Organic Chemistry for years, and it is a rare student who cannot use ll NMR,, 3C NMR, and a host of multiple-pulse techniques to identify even structures of moderate complexity. However, NMR as a technique goes far beyond structure determination, and a number of these facets have been included in recent physical chemistry experiments. 

X-ray diffraction has been a part of the physical chemistry laboratory curriculum for a long time, but mostly using the relatively simple powder diffraction technique. However a new experiment introduces the more complex method of single crystal X-ray diffraction (80). Another new experiment uses the technique to investigate the structure of alloys (81). 

The growth of computational chemistry and the ready availability of commercial ab initio packages has had a dramatic effect on the way that physical chemistry is practiced in the contemporary research laboratory. The clear implication is that without integration of computational chemistry into our physical chemistry laboratory curriculum we will be failing to teach our students how contemporary research is conducted. Fortunately, a number of approaches to including computational chemistry in the physical chemistry laboratory have been developed. These range from modifications of the full course to individual computational chemistry exercises for the laboratory. These developments can be found in Table VII. 

Integrating Computational Chemistry into the Physical Chemistry Laboratory Curriculum A Wet Lab/Dry Lab Approach 91... 

The development of physical chemistry experiments is an active and vibrant endeavor. Since Schwenz and Moore came out in 1993, over 250 new experiments have been developed. These experiments involved a wide range of modem instrumentation and modem topics. They included innovative pedagogical approaches. They included a wide range of traditional topics as well. Together they reflect the importance of a wide range of experiments and approaches in a healthy physical chemistry curriculum. 

Physical Chemistry Curriculum Into the Future with Digital Technology... 

Two papers reported powder pattern crystallographic results. The paper by Santos et al. (7) stood out from the rest because it presented a collection of more classical physical chemistry experiments. In this paper the authors described the use of micro-combustion calorimetry, Knudsen effusion to determine enthalpy of sublimation, differential scanning calorimetry, X-ray diffraction, and computed entropies. While this paper may provide some justification for including bomb calorimetry and Knudsen cell experiments in student laboratories, the use of differential scanning calorimetry and x-ray diffraction also are alternatives that would make for a crowded curriculum. Thus, how can we choose content for the first physical chemistiy course that shows the currency of the discipline while maintaining the goal to teach the fundamentals and standard techniques as well ... 

For those more inclined to use environmental topics to enrich thermodynamics and kinetics parts of the physical chemistry curriculum, Modeling Stratospheric Ozone Chemistry and the Contrail projects are two examples. 

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