Although I've never done it, I've thought about giving students the opportunity to get hints on exam questions for reduced credit on the question (both 'long answer' and multiple choice). I'm curious to hear if anyone does this in their classes (and why or why not). If you allow students to get hints how do you do this (mechanics) and do you think students learn more by being able to get hints?
Having just gone through "the rules" for balancing redox reactions in my Gen Chem class, I once again am faced with a textbook that does things in a different order than I prefer. When I balance redox reactions, I add electrons at the beginning of the process to balance the change in oxidation state/number of the species being oxidized or reduced. Then, at the end, I can use charge balance as a self-check; if the charge balances itself out, then I probably did everything correctly. My current textbook (and many others), have students go through all the steps (add wa
We have a Junior Qualifying Exam at Reed, which in our department takes the form of an oral exam based on a recent paper from the primary literature for each student. I just finished picking 4 papers for this year's crop of inorganic junior quals. The students have 3 days to learn everything they can about the paper before the oral exam in front of 2 faculty. Several of these choices were inspired by talks I heard at the ACS Salt Lake City meeting.
I use the framework molecular model set by Prentice Hall in my Inorganic class.
I am about to put in my "book" order for the fall and I was wondering if anyone has found a better model set to use in Inorganic chemistry? This set has trigonal pyramid and octahedral geometries.
Kurt
Hi all,
On my inorganic exam last week, I wrote a question asking the students to construct a Born-Haber cycle to calculate the heat of reaction for the thermite reaction (nicely timed as our lab staff had just done the demo outside of our classroom for the Gen Chem students). The data that I provided were the first three ionization energies for Fe and Al, the heats of formation for Fe and Al in the gas phase, and the lattice energies for Al2O3 and Fe2O3.
Happy Valentine's Day!
Barbara Reisner forwarded this YouTube link that she received via the Materials Science Department at Cambridge.
Symmetry Challenge!
A contest across VIPEr, the Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Electronic Resource.
Here is a chance to show your symmetry skills to all the inorganic chemists and students of inorganic chemistry on ionicviper.org!
Given a cube and 6 equal length lines how many objects of different point group symmetry can you construct? All six lines must fit either edge to edge or vertex to vertex (it is ok to mix and match if you want), and each face must have one and only one line on it.
Oral presentations in Inorganic chemistry- Ligand of the week
I have had students in the past give short oral Element reports. They are given the following guidelines:
1. Where is the element found in nature (biology or geology)?
2. How is the element used in society? As an element or in a Compound, etc.
3. Show some balanced equations involving the element making or breaking bonds.
4. Show structures of compounds including the element.
5. Show chemistry you think is particularly interesting.