CHED 116 |
| The draft proposal for the 2008 revision of the Committee on Professional Training Guidelines requires all chemistry majors to take a “Foundations of Inorganic Chemistry” course. Majors from some but not all department-defined degree tracks may also be required to take an “in-depth” course in inorganic chemistry or some composite course including inorganic chemistry. Once the tracks have been chosen by a particular department, how can the Foundations of Inorganic Chemistry course best be designed to serve those tracks? It is proposed that inorganic faculty, and faculty directly involved in the tracks, consider a checklist including the topics normally covered in descriptive and advanced inorganic chemistry courses, and choose which topics students in each track could most profitably study. We will present such a checklist. When the results are compiled, it might be found that the various tracks in a particular department would be best served by having two flavors of the Fundamentals course. (These could be offered in alternate years for students in the different tracks; perhaps the other version could be elected as an “in-depth” course for a student to add to the Foundation course.) A second question concerns duplication between the Inorganic and Physical Chemistry courses in Symmetry and Molecular Orbital Theory. We will compare coverage of these topics in physical and inorganic textbooks. Should both courses cover these topics? A procedure will be described that we have used to determine whether a student's previous coverage of these topics in Physical or Inorganic Chemistry has sufficed for purposes of the study of the other branch of Chemistry. |
|
Revitalizing the Undergraduate Descriptive Inorganic Chemistry Course
8:30 AM-11:10 AM, Monday, August 20, 2007 Seaport -- Constitution Room, Oral
Division of Chemical Education |