Every year about this time in the semester when I teach General Chemistry I, I realize that one of the significant obstacles in chemistry for my students is their ability to read and interpret problems - they get hung up on the translation of words. I'd really like to find more examples of word problems that don't require specific chemical knowledge but do require this translation (and involve things like unit conversion and percentages). We develop a problem solving method in class, but I feel like working with this sort of problem would be really beneficial.
Does anyone know of good resources for finding these types of problems? I'd like to have more practice problems that I could give to the students early in the semester. (And actually, throughout the semester!)
Erica is just down the street from me, and though I've not met her, I know she has taught a chirality course jointly with Dan O'Leary (an organic chemist at Pomona). I couldn't find a link to the chirality course, but here is a link that gives some information on the problem solving course.
http://www.math.pomona.edu/flapan_nsf/index.htm
I've looked at Flapan's site, and there's a lot of very useful info there. I've got a phone call scheduled with her to pick her brain a bit more later this week. Many thanks to the VIPEr community for getting me pointed in the right direction on this! (I'm going to be instituting some kind of problem solving course at my institution this fall - it won't be a regular course, but an optional set of sessions - we'll see how that goes!)