Donald E. Jones Western Maryland College Westminster, Morylond and David F. Roswell LOYOIO College Baltimore, Maryland
The Course Content of General Chemistry
I
A decade later
In 1961, Howard Nechamkin published a study on what college teachers believed the course content of general chemistry should be.' His study was the result of 105 responses to a questionnaire sent to the "Director of General Chemistry" a t selected institutions. The questionnaire consisted of 229 topics selected from the indices of general chemistry textbooks. The respondent was asked to rate the topics on a scale from A through E where A was defined to be "essential for inclusion in the course" and E "unnecessary and should be omitted.'' Now, a decade later, to determine what changes have occurred in what college teachers believe is important for the course content of general chemistrv. a auestionnaire was prepared and mailed to the D&ctor of General Chemistry at 352 institution^.^ These institutions were selected a t random. The questionnaire consisted of 270 items, 250 of which were topics which the respondent was asked to rate on the same scale as in the original study. Of these topics 227 were identical to the ones listed in the earlier study and 23 were new. The new topics were selected from the indices of recent general chemistry texthooks. Of the 352 questionnaires sent out, 194 were returned carefully completed and in time to be compiled for this study. This corresponds to a 55% return, which is nearly the same percentage response as in the original study. A computer program was developed to compile the results.3 The alphabetical ratings for the topics were assigned point values. An A rating by a respondent gave the item a score of 100; B, 200; C, 300; D, 400; E, 500 on this questionnaire. The scores of each topic were summed for all questionnaires on which that topic had been rated and then divided by the total numher of responses for that topic. In no case were there less than 180 responses to a topic. The listing of topics arranged in order of increasing point values (i.e., decreasing importance) are shown in the table. Each topic is assigned a position or rank number ranging from 1 for the most important topic to 226 for the least important topic. The table also shows a topic's position in the original study as well as its position in this study. The results show that there are 7 topics with point values greater than 400, which corresponds to exclusion from the course, the earlier study indicated that there were none. The current study indicates that there are 71 topics that are considered ielatively unimportant (i.e., point values from 300 to 399), while onlv 20 items in the previous study fell into this category. For the past few years scieatists have talked and written about their suspicions that descriptive chemistry is out of vogue whereas physical and theoretical topics are being included to a much greater degree in general chemistry but no quantitative data was cited to support the 'Nechamkin, H., J. CHEM. EDUC., 38,255 (1961). ZThe authors will supply the interested readers with a list of these institutions. 3The authors will supply interested readers with a listing of these programs.
suspicion. In order to test this susdcion a listine was compiled of all of those topics whoseielative position had increased or decreased by 50 or more places. Those topics increasing their position more dramatically (thus being considered relatively more important) include entropy. free energy, thermodynamics, Pauli exclusion principie, and quantum numbers. The entire list is composed of nearly all theoretical topics. The list of those topics decreasing their relative position is composed of all descriptive chemistry topics headed by zinc, sulfur, phosphorous, iron chemistry. The computer program used was designed' and data cards sorted mechanically so that the point values of topics and responses to 20 general information questions could be compiled individually for different categories of institutions as well as for all institutions combined. Questions were also asked about lecture (hrslwk). recitation (hrs/wk and numher of students/recitation);' laboratory (dayslweek, number of studentsllah). tvpe of academic calendar and finally whether qualitative a n d quantitative analysis were offered. Three hours of lecture appears to be standard with an occasional four hours but with no significant differences in the categories of institutions compared, e.g., nature of institution, size of institution, highest degree offered. With regard to the numher of recitations each week, the trend is towards more recitations the larger the school and the more advanced the highest degree offered. The class size of the recitation appears most often to be in the range 21-30 even in the larger institutions. As expected the very small institutions (
