Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews
Laboratory Handbook for General Chemistry by Norman E. Griswold, H. A. Neidig, James N. Spencer, and Conrad Stanitski Chemical Education Resources, Inc.: Palmyra, PA, 1996. vi + 54 pp. ISBN: 0-87540-491-X. $5.95. reviewed by Nancy Gordon
It is always reassuring to be asked to review a book that one has already adopted. We have been using this manual for our General Chemistry laboratories for several years, and as the title suggests it is a laboratory manual designed for beginning general chemistry students. Using very few pages, it leaves little to student imaginations about laboratory equipment and operations and provides straightforward descriptions of the basics that beginning students need to start laboratory work. The manual appropriately starts with a discussion of laboratory safety, which, while thorough enough to be freestanding, could be modified to fit particular needs of a course. It emphasizes the most important aspects of safety. Along with safety, MSDSs are explained, as is the importance of proper disposal of chemicals. The next section shows a picture of each common piece of equipment with its name and a two- or three-word description of its function. I often see students using this section to identify “foreign” objects that they find in their drawers. In the next six sections clear and concise descriptions of elementary techniques using the basic equipment are given. These sections are on heating, small-scale operations, transferring materials,
edited by
Jeffrey Kovac University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN 37996-1600
separations, weighing, and measuring liquid volumes. In the section on transferring materials there is an emphasis on not contaminating stock reagents, which should endear the book to instructors. Students should be able to perform each technique from the description but would, of course, benefit from a demonstration with actual laboratory equipment. However, a distracted laboratory instructor can be confident that any important point that he or she might forget to mention has been covered in the manual. My only criticism of the manual comes in the Data Representation and Recording section. In the discussion of representing data using graphs and figures, there is a good description of how to make a graph. The omission is the equation for a straight line, and how to determine this equation if the drawn line is linear. Furthermore, there is no mention of linear regression calculations on calculators or computers in this section. For completeness, I would also include the equation for calculating the average of a data set before describing the calculation for the standard deviation. However, these omissions are easily supplemented. Finally, the manual has several appendices, which include a description of glass working, Spectronic 20 operation, useful data tables, and references to more extensive laboratory manuals. This book is 30 pages of valuable information for any beginning chemistry student, and I am confident that students armed with the knowledge of the material in the book will have a safe and productive laboratory experience. Nancy Gordon is at the University of Southern Maine, Portland, ME;
[email protected].
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 77 No. 7 July 2000 • Journal of Chemical Education
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