The California Chemistry Diagnostics Test Project constructed a 44-item test from those items found relevant to student success in first-term general chemistry.

In 2001, the ACS reported, “The Ph.D. in chemistry usually prepares individuals for careers in basic research. The degree does not typically prepare these highly skilled research professionals to be faculty members.†In 2004, a report of a workshop held at NSF noted that “the purpose of the postdoctoral experience should … prepare postdocs for professional careers that are not solely as faculty members at research-intensive universities.†For the past 10 years the UCLA Chemistry and Biochemistry department has addressed these issues through a Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) course for Ph.D. students and postdoctoral scholars. To assess the long-term impact of the course, a questionnaire was sent to 91 people with whom we still had contact information and who had participated in the program between 1994 and 2002. From the 41% response rate, 86% (32) identified themselves as being in academic positions from the full range of types of higher education institutions. The survey revealed that all components of the seminar were helpful for the academic recruitment process and that some aspects continued to be useful for the respondents in their current faculty positions.

The Molecular Science systemic reform project, which has just begun its third year, is developing network-deliverable curricula for the first two years of Chemistry. 1 The goals of the project are to prepare students who have a deep understanding of chemistry concepts and principles, have learned collaboration skills, can use the modern-technology tools of the chemist, and can write about chemistry. In addition, the project is integrating technology and telecommunications into the instructional process and shifting the instruction from lecture to active student learning. Faculty from six institutions (Crossroads School, East Los Angeles College, Pasadena City College, Mt. San Antonio College, California State University, Fullerton [CSUF], and the University of California, Los Angeles [UCLA]) form the core of the project. This crosssection represents the common and shared responsibility that exists for teaching the first two years of chemistry and the diversity of students in the nation.Consortium faculty are primarily responsible for development and testing of the new curricular materials and processes, although other institutions that have joined us during the project are also developing and field-testing materials. Our strategy is based on active learning and consists of four levels of curricular development. At the bottom-and everything rests on this-is the creation of a large number of databases that allow students to explore, examine, and study fundamental chemical observations and data. Students encounter these data sets through exploration assignments, which are structured tasks and tutorials that lead to generalizations and classifications and then theories. This process yields a physical and practical understanding of the theoretical and conceptual foundation of molecular science. After the explorations students use the data in new ways in constructions, which are sets of problem-oriented tasks that force students to propose and test models and to think critically about the theory. Applications, the highest-level tasks, address real-world problems, bridge databases, require students to transfer information across areas, and require "system thinking". Working through the problems requires that students use nuanced judgment and apply multiple criteria. They must impose meaning on the information and evaluate the relevance and significance of the data.Five themes encompass the core concepts for the databases: molecular structure, mechanism and reactivity, reactions and synthesis, theory and concepts, and ethics and policy. Within each theme, there are constructions and applications focused towards the biological sciences, material science, environmental science as well as "pure chemistry." Assessment drives the instructional design. Evaluation guidelines and assessment criteria for the knowledge, skills, and abilities that students are expected to acquire in each activity are prepared first. These inform the development of the explorations, constructions, and applications. In effect, these guidelines becom...

Kinetics constitutes a core topic in both the lecture and laboratory components of lower- level chemistry courses. While textbook examples can ignore issues of time, temperature and safety, the laboratory can not. Reactions must occur slowly enough to be detected by students, occur rapidly enough for data collection in the few hours assigned to a laboratory period, be safe enough to be handled by students, and be simple enough to provide easily interpreted data. Few reactions meet these restrictions. We report here a new, inexpensive (~5 cents/student), environmentally benign system involving the reaction of FDandC Red #3 and hypochlorite. Students use a desktop visible spectrophotometer to quantitatively follow the rate of disappearance of the colored reagent under a variety of initial conditions. The first-order reaction in both dye and bleach yields simple data that students can easily process and graph using spreadsheet software to obtain the rate constant and the rate law.

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