Late in their junior year and into the first two months of their senior year, chemistry majors at Willamette write and submit a research proposal.  Shortly before entering the lab for their thesis work, I lead this activity that takes place in our Senior Projects seminar class.  The class meets one hour per week and we cover topics such as how to write an effective grant proposal, ethics in science, presenting data, etc., as well as this safety activity.

In my sophomore level inorganic course, I have experimented with the idea of a living syllabus as a way to develop my own specific learning objectives and to help the students connect the material to the tasks that will be expected of them in assessing their learning. 

This excercise explains the basics of drawing graphs for an introductory chemistry class. It give examples of common pitfalls and how to avoid them. Students are guided through graphing a data set, adjusting axes, adding trend lines, modifying legends and adding appropriate labels. The excercise also provides several examples of graphs and asks students to critically evaluate them.