Undergraduate Teaching Laboratories

It is certainly a problem—for the students, for the instructors themselves, and for the researcher—when an instructor does not understand that the research data their students collect are valuable to a scientist. The students can fail to make personal connections with their work, perceiving the activities as simply more of the same traditional laboratories that they have always done. Instructors can fail to understand why particular choices were made in the curriculum and can suggest changes that completely remove the research component from the laboratory. In cases such as these, the complexities of creating an environment that synthesizes research and the undergraduate teaching laboratory are evermore clear. 

Bomb" combustion calorimetry or constant-volume calorimetry is a technique that dates back to Lavoisier178 (Fig. 11.76), is now mostly relegated to undergraduate teaching laboratories and is in bad need of a renaissance. It measures the internal energy of combustion AEc, which is easily converted to AHc, and then converted to standard enthalpies of formation AHf s.is- In a typical "macro" experiment, with commercially available equipment, a very carefully measured mass m (-2.0 g) of a sample of molar mass M g/mol and... 

Hollenback JJ. Wixson EN, Geske GD et al. (2006) A New Model for Transitioning Students from the Undergraduate Teaching Laboratory to the Research Laboratory. J Chem Educ 83 1835-1843. 

Professor Newman s extraordinary zeal carried over to the area of steric effects, this intense Interest culminating in the publication of the landmark book Steric Effects in Organic Chemistry in 1956. His philosophy of how to teach an undergraduate laboratory course is clearly spelled out in a later text entitled An Advanced Organic Laboratory Course (1976). Mel was never irreverent, but did hold strong opinions on how certain activities should be carried out. For example, his writing style was notably terse and his lectures were characteristically to the point, except for the joke or two that he had inevitably to interject. 

In conclusion, with the increased productivity, ability to run a wider range of experiments, and the positive, enthusiastic student participation that results, micro-wave heating is clearly proving its place as a valuable tool in the undergraduate teaching laboratory. 

For the undergraduate teaching laboratory, many add a 13th Use microscale experiments. 

Preview This section discusses the role of undergraduate and graduate students who function as teaching assistants in promoting safety in undergraduate teaching laboratories. 

Until quite recently, most undergraduate Raman spectroscopy has been performed on locally constructed instruments. In the late 1980s, instrument vendors donated or loaned FT-Raman spectrometers to several schools. These instruments have been used in instructional laboratories in American and British universities and their use stimulated adoption of similar instrumentation elsewhere. Similar donations of small systems based on single-stage dispersive spectrographs and lower-power lasers have served to speed the adoption of these instruments in teaching laboratories. 

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