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First Name

heather

Last Name

schenck

Position

professor

Affiliation

university of wisconsin - la crosse

Institution Website URL

https://www.uwlax.edu/chemistry-and-biochemistry/our-people/

Teaching Interests

I teach first semester organic for chemistry & biochemistry majors, as well as the one semester organic course for non-majors. I also teach organic laboratory courses, primarily the non-majors lab (which I redesigned in 2019 to increase application-based experiments and decrease synthesis). I also teach an upper level elective on spectroscopy for organic molecules (primarily NMR); this course includes a lab in which I designed all of the experiments. In the lab portion of the elective, students do 2D NMR, selective NMR, NMR kinetics (EXSY), and an equilibrium study of association behavior using NMR and IR.

Research Interests

Pedagogy enhancements for large organic lectures to increase student success. I am now revising a manuscript to publish results of a multi-year study in which a change I made in mechanism pedagogy was correlated with a halving of drops/Ds/Fs (from 32% to 16.5%) and a ~70% reduction in errors in use of curved arrows. I hope to test methods to help students succeed better remembering reactions in future years. I also won first prize last fall for a proposed smart phone app design in the WiSys APPStart competition. My proposal is for a smart phone app to help students master cyclohexane chair drawings. I will be seeking funding to code and release the app starting in 2023.

City

LA CROSSE

State (USA only)

WI

Zip Code (or country if not USA)

54601

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History

Member for

1 year 11 months