Physical chemistry curriculum course

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. 

Computational methods are of increasing importance in the chemical sciences. This paper describes a computational chemistry laboratory course that has been developed and implemented at the University of Michigan as part of the core physical chemistry curriculum. This laboratory course introduces students to the principle methods of computational chemistry and uses these methods to explore and visualize simple chemical problems. 

By the late 20th century, continued calls for the revision of the physical chemistry curriculum were being heard (2-8). These calls were for a significant modernization of both the lecture and laboratory curriculum involving an inclusion of modem research topics into the lecture and the laboratory, the deletion or movement of selected material into other courses, and a reduction in the writing requirements for the laboratory. More specifically, the need for experiments and discussion relating to the incorporation of laser and computer technology has intensified with the spread of these devices into all the chemistry subdisciplines. The ACS published a selection of modernized experiments in an earlier volume (5). 

This chapter will describe how the physical chemistry curriculum at Creighton University was revised to include a one-semester overview of physical chemistry with laboratory, followed by elective courses in specific areas of physical chemistry. The course is preceded by a mathematics course designed specifically to prepare chemistry students for the mathematics encountered in a rigorous physical chemistry course. 

In discussing physical chemistry curriculum revision we voiced many of the same concerns that are detailed in the New Traditions Physical Chemistry Curriculum Planning Session Report (7). Our new curriculum attempts to address specifically the concerns regarding math preparation, course content, active learning, writing skills, and appropriate utilization of the laboratory course to enhance learning. 

The Introduction to Physical Chemistry course is the centerpiece of the physical chemistry curriculum. It is named as such only because, by college rules, we needed to distinguish it from the previously offered Physical Chemistry I and Physical Chemistry II courses. We do believe, however, that it is aptly named because it provides an introduction to three of the four major areas of physical chemistry and our students are required to take an additional elective course covering one topic in greater detail. 

Our physical chemistry curriculum revision is clearly a work in progress . More work is needed so that the math course is more clearly and closely tied to the physical chemistry lecture course. The content of the lecture course needs to be refined and assessed. Finally, the laboratory experiments need to be modernized to more closely reflect current experimental physical chemistry. 

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. 

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 ... 

The problems are the ultimate deliverable in a physical chemistry course. If you can t do the problems, you can t do physical chemistry. Students know this, and focus on the problems, sometimes to the exclusion of reading the text. As a result, I suspect students primary sense of what the field of physical chemistry comprises, and what it might be useful for, arises directly from the problems assigned. What message do students take home from the problems While a thorough inventory of the problems available to physical chemistry instructors would be most instructive, the problems collected in Table I, culled from the chapters on chemical kinetics in a number of physical chemistry texts, illustrate the challenges facing the curriculum. 

For the overall health of our program it is critical for us to pay careful attention to the physical chemistry courses which have enrolled 25-30 chemistry majors each year for the past 3 years. The development of our curriculum has always aimed at addressing student learning needs while at the same time inspiring student achievement of high academic standards. 

Fitting Physical Chemistry into a Crowded Curriculum A Rigorous One-Semester Physical Chemistry Course with Laboratory... 

Conspicuously missing from the list of electives (and anywhere in our curriculum) is a course on modem experimental physical chemistry and/or lasers in chemistry. We hope to correct this omission with a new hire in the next two years. 

We have had only two graduating classes complete the full series of physical chemistry courses, including the electives. In those two classes combined, 50 % of the students took more than one physical chemistry elective and two students in the class of 2005 took all three electives that were offered during that year. Based on the number of courses taken we conclude that most of our students are getting more physical chemistry with the new curriculum than they were with the traditional two-semester sequence. 

We are also pleased that the ACS Committee on Professional Training has recently endorsed the idea of one-semester Foundations courses (5). We hope that our curriculum, as we continue to refine and improve it, will serve as a model for how these foundational courses (in physical chemistry and other subdisciplines of chemistry) might be constructed. 

This book is mainly intended as a supplement for the mathematically sophisticated topics in an advanced freshman chemistry course. My intent is not to force-feed math and physics into the chemistry curriculum. It is to reintroduce just enough to make important results understandable (or, in the case of quantum mechanics, surprising). We have tried to produce a high-quality yet affordable volume, which can be used in conjunction with any general chemistry book. This lets the instructor choose whichever general chemistry book covers basic concepts and descriptive chemistry in a way which seems most appropriate for the students. The book might also be used for the introductory portions of a junior-level course for students who have not taken multivariate calculus, or who do not need the level of rigor associated with the common one-year junior level physical chemistry sequence for example, an introduction to biophysical chemistry or materials science should build on a foundation which is essentially at this level. 

Alexis Bell We ve recently revised the undergraduate curriculum at Berkeley, and very heavy consideration was given to what is taught in both the courses that we teach and in the service courses. We ve implemented a new physical chemistry sequence that was developed by the chemists. One of the two courses is largely devoted to statistical thermodynamics and the introduction of thermodynamics at the molecular level, then going up to the continuum level. In the future, our students will see the molecular picture as taught by chemists and the continuum picture in a separate course taught by our own faculty. 

The primary aim of this book is to help in remedying this situation. It can be used as the basis of a course for food science majors at a not-too-early stage in the curriculum (some universities may prefer a graduate course). Hence it is written as a textbook. A second aim is its use as a reference book, since basic aspects of physical chemistry are not always taken into account in food research or process development. Therefore, I have tried to cover all subjects of importance that are not treated in most courses in food chemistry or food processing/engineering. 

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. 

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