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Chemistry: An Industry-Based Introduction with CD-ROM
By John Kenkel, Paul Kelter, and David Hage
It is no secret that the conventional basic chemistry courses offered in high schools, colleges and universities today are out of touch with the chemist's real world of work. Students that take our courses presumably come away with some basic scientific knowledge, but still have no grasp of what a chemistry professional's career is about and seldom a clue about how the chemistry professional's workplace operates or how it touches their lives. I believe that this does a major disservice to our beloved discipline and creates deception and confusion among the masses. With abstractions and only purely academic notions as the backdrop, it is not hard to understand why students perceive chemistry as little more than a difficult required class in their curriculum and why relatively few people give any credit to chemistry as having some noteworthy impact on their lives.
The problems most of us as teachers have in making the connection to the chemist's industrial workplace are:
1) Very little of our own academic preparation made any such connection.
2) The time required for covering introductory chemistry in the traditional way does not allow for any such connection.
3) We have had no, or perhaps only very little, industrial experience ourselves.
4) The textbooks and other resources that are available don't make any such connection.
These problems have prevailed in academia for so long that a wide gulf has formed between introductory courses and the real everyday work of a chemistry professional - a gulf that, to most observers, would appear to be so incumbent as to be impossible to close. Upon researching the possibilities and after teaching for twenty-three years in a college program that prepares students to work as technicians in this workplace, however, I have found the needed reform to be surprisingly painless.
The first three problems above can be solved by letting the students take an active role and discover the connections for themselves. This is done by providing assignments that force them to investigate and research, on their own, specific workplace situations, habits and skills. Such assignments can take the form of self-arranged tours of local industries and interviews with practicing chemistry professionals, or library, Internet, or other searches that lead them to, or reinforce, some specific industrial connection. They then write a report on their findings, keep a journal, and/or report orally to the rest of the class so that class discussions and active learning activities take place. This work can co-exist alongside classroom coverage of the traditional topics and the quizzes and exams over the traditional material. Such an approach effectively neutralizes concerns over the lack of knowledge of industrial connections on the part of the instructor and concerns over the time required to cover the subject matter in the traditional way.
Ideas for specific assignments, however, are lacking. My solution to this, and to the fourth problem listed above - the lack of useful textbooks and other resources - is this textbook and CD-ROM. It is a textbook that makes the needed connections. It has the following attributes:
1) Over 100 side boxes (an average of six per chapter) that link the topics at hand to the chemist's workplace.
2) Over 150 homework and discussion assignments that can fill the need for the "homework assignments" mentioned above. These include an assignment within each side box and additional assignments at the end of each chapter under the heading "For Class Discussion and Reports."
3) A CD-ROM that is not only a study guide for the text but also provides fictional industrial "applications" according to the "I.O.N.S. Concept." These can also fill the need for the "homework assignments" mentioned above.
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