Laboratory instruction textbook

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 ... 

First, by indulging his passionate belief in science for the people, he gave students the kind of hands-on education in chemistry that he had wanted as a young man. Before Frankland, students everywhere learned science from books most never even entered a laboratory. Working tirelessly over a period of 15 years, Frankland gradually changed that and dramatically improved the state of science education in Britain. He compiled a list of 109 experiments that students needed to understand firsthand in order to pass his examinations. He wrote a textbook that became a standard for chemistry instruction, in part because it incorporated his ideas on valency and organic structures and his newly developed notation system. 

In most of the school still the traditional school chemistry textbooks are in use. Such books are used for reading, revision, to follow instructions for some laboratory exercise etc. However traditional chemistry textbooks have been abandoned in those countries in which process has become a significant feature of school chemistry courses. 

Each laboratory should make available to all its users a frequently updated set of detailed instructions for the collection of specimens and for the carrying out of all the tests done, together with information on the interpretation of results. No user should then have to rely unduly on his memory, nor should he have to obtain details on the carrying out of tests from textbooks, where many different descriptions of the same test are often to be found. The number of different containers for specimens should be kept to a minimum, and the label and request forms should be as simple as possible to expedite their proper completion the request form should include a space for entering the time of collection of the specimen. Possible ways of improving and simplifying request forms, and avoiding unnecessary transcription steps in the laboratory itself, have been considered by Lee and Schoen (L2a). 

While this textbook could easily be used as a primary textbook for a course in chemical safety, the authors actually strongly prefer that it be used instead throughout the curriculum. We believe that safety instruction is so important that it should be included in all chemistry laboratory courses. Additionally, the small bites of lab safety included among the 70 sections used separately over an extended four-year period provide constant reinforcement of the importance of safety that nurtures a strong safety ethic. This book has been written with that use in mind. 

Note that rather detailed experimental procedures are given early in the textbook, whereas somewhat less detailed instructions are provided later on. This is because many of the basic laboratory operations will have become familiar to you in time and need not be spelled out. It is hoped that this approach to the design of procedures will decrease your tendency to think that you are essentially following a recipe in a cookbook. Moreover, many of the experimental procedures given in the literature of organic chemistry are relatively brief and require the chemist to "fill in the blanks," so it is valuable to gain some initial experience in figuring out some details on your own. 

OSHA mandated Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDSs) contain important safety information that should be incorporated into undergraduate chemistry instruction. Ho>vever, these documents are not well designed for the academic teaching laboratory. Additionally, there is little or no coverage of MSDSs in chemistry laboratory manuals or textbooks. One approach to the incorporation of this topic this is the introduction of a student exercise that involves the preparation of an experiment-specific laboratory chemical safety summary (LCSS) based on the LCSSs presented in the latest edition of Prudent Practices in the Laboratory (1). These one-page student-prepared summaries use information obtained from MSDSs, but are modified to the actual quantities, concentrations, and procedures used in the experiment. This approach provides beginning chemistry students with appropriate education about MSDSs. 

Instruction in laboratory safety is increasingly becoming an important part of laboratory courses at many academic institutions. Also, other research organizations, both commercial and otherwise, offer organized courses in laboratory safety. This textbook has been designed to be used as a reference for such courses, both for students and for instructors preparing a curriculum. 

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