Board Members’ Picks: Guided-Inquiry Organic Chemistry Laboratories
Some publications, presentations, and events that caught our interest
From Cathy Welder
I met OrganicERs member Bruce Hathaway (LeTourneau University, BruceHathaway@letu.edu) this past summer at the cCWCS workshop Teaching Guided-Inquiry Organic Chemistry Laboratories. Bruce shared a number of ideas with other participants regarding what he has done in his lab courses. He has since published three articles in The Chemical Educator that I feel may be of interest to many of us. The articles can be found on the journal’s webpage at http://chemeducator.org/tocs/t10021001.htm. Bruce has spruced up some experiments by incorporating a bit of inquiry. In these three experiments, students are given structural variants of starting materials and are asked to make some conclusions based on what they have discovered from their results. I encourage you to take a look!
B. A. Hathaway, D. J. Ball and M. K. McAllister, “Investigating Steric Effects in SN2 Substitution Reactions: Reactions of Acetaminophen with Alkyl Halides.” Chem. Educator 2016, 21, 223–225.
B. A. Hathaway and K. M. Villermin, “Reactions of Hydroxy– and Alkoxy–Substituted Benzaldehydes with Sodium Iodide and Bleach in Methanol: A Guided–Inquiry Experiment for the Organic Chemistry Lab.” Chem. Educator 2016, 21, 159–161.
B. A. Hathaway and A. I. Mitchell, “Effects on the Endo/Exo Ratio of the Diels-Alder Reaction of Furan with Different N-(Methyl or Dimethylphenyl)maleimides.” Chem. Educator 2016, 21, 155–158.