Teaching models Development/chemistry

Chitdeborough, G. D., Treagust, D. E, Mocerino, M. (2002, Eebruaiy 2002). Constraints to the development of first year university chemistry students mental models of chemical phenomena. Presented at the 11th Annual Teaching and Learning Eorum for Western Australian Universities, Edith Cowan University, Australia. 

Michael Gery, who developed the OZIPR model, graciously provided advice on its use as well as electronic copies of the documentation. This model, which contains the two major chemical mechanism schemes for gas-phase, VOC-NC/ chemistry in use in atmospheric chemistry, is available on the Academic Press Web site (http //www.academicpress.com/pecs/down-load). A number of problems using this model are included in the book, and it is a valuable teaching tool for assessing the effects of various model input parameters on predicted concentrations of a wide variety of gas-phase species. His assistance and that of Marcia Dodge of the U.S. EPA in making it available are appreciated. 

In his constant search for better methods of teaching he made a 60-minute color-sound movie Techniques of Organic Chemistry, and developed a set of precise plastic molecular models, which are larger than, but have the same relative dimensions as, Dreiding models. Unlike the latter, however, the Fieser models have been so inexpensive to manufacture that even undergraduate students have been able to afford a set. 

Philosophical concerns, however, only reveal part of why Boerhaave adopted the instrument framework so enthusiastically. The pedagogical context and norms of the University of Leiden medical faculty served as both the motor and the model for Boerhaave s chemical lectures. Teaching in the medical faculty of a university, Boerhaave needed to provide his chemistry with a theoretical framework, but in the traditional didactic presentation of chemistry, the chemical principles served as the foundation for the discussion of the theory of chemistry. Thus, Boerhaave adopted and developed his account of the instruments to provide both a theoretical framework for examining chemical action and a method to organize diverse chemical phenomena. 

Such examples could be multiplied many fold. Think of measures of pesticides, toxins in the water, or even at a greater distance from analytical chemistry, the numbers we use to assess the quality of teaching. The point is that we now have a model for an ideal kind of objective analysis—be it of steel alloy composition, fetal heart condition, food quality, or even professorial competence we should be able to subject the object of analysis to some instrument, the operation of which is relatively simple—ideally, push-button simple—and obtain "the answer." Of course, not everything can accommodate such an ideal, but as an ideal it serves to guide us as we develop and critique methods of analysis. 

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