La Plume, Pennsylvania 18440
I
There is a controversy about the necessity of instrumentation, for college Freshman and even Sophomores, beyond the pH meter, colorimeters, single-pan speed balances, and automatic titrimeter. It is not our intent to take a stand in this controversy but merely to state several observations made during the Spring Semester of the 1968-69 Academic year at Keystone Junior College as to the degree of proficiency exhibited by five Sophomore organic chemistry students in carrying out open-ended instrumental analysis experiments for the first time. The General Organic laboratory students were assigned spaces in the Instrumental laboratory. Each student was assigned an instrument and was to familiarize himself with the instruction manual for that instrument. The students would then carry out the calibration instructions on such items as the infrared spectrophotometer, the Beckman B spectrophotometer, the differential thermalyzer, the anto titrimeter, the Abbe refractometer, the Spectronic 20 colorimeter, and the Klett-Summerson colorimeter. The students were encoilraged to be as independent as they possibly could in their investigations. In order to help provide an atmosphere of freedom, the instructors refrained from offering suggestions even when they recognized or could foresee difficulties that a particular student was about to encounter. Once the difficulty was realized by the student and he asked for help the instructor would attempt to guide the student in locating the difficulty by asking some leading questions. Some literature is available in the Colleae library. Such sources as Willard, Merritt, and Dean, kwing, the Journal of Analytical Chemistly, Organic Chemistry, The Journal of Chemical Education, and Chemistry were on the shelves. Also, students had access to the libraries of Marywood College and the University of Scranton. These literature sources partially supplied the students with possible experiments pertaining to organic compounds that would be of interest and would relate to the material being covered in the lectures. Each student had three weeks to do the work and one week to make a formal written report in addition to a thirty minute oral report to the class. The next procedure re-assigned students to different instruments and allowed them three weeks for their work and another week for reports. After eight weeks of work, the students were assigned conventional organic experiments and allowed to use the instruments as they needed them. Some of the observations of the two instructors were At the o.tt9c-t the studet,ta were romerhat at a loss hrcnusc they did n
