Chemical Education Today
Reports from Other Journals
The Science Teacher: Fall 2005 by Steve Long
Alternative assessment, periodic table trends, and teaching the history of chemistry are three topics recently published in The Science Teacher that JCE readers may find interesting. These TST articles were published between March and Summer 2005. Resources, teaching tips, assessment ideas, and content are featured in these articles. Assessment The Idea Bank section featuring tips and techniques for creative teaching included “Interview Assessment”. Amy Coan describes her philosophy of and use of an individual student interview for assessing laboratory activities and comprehension. Coan lists sample questions she has used with students and the improvements she has observed in students’ participation and learning. Coan states, “When each student must answer detailed questions during a lab interview, it forces students to think, and consequently, more learning occurs.” Also included are suggestions for possible improvements for the interview process as well as a brief discussion of the major disadvantage for interviews—time. Effective student assessment is a challenge for many instructors. “The Mandatory Student–Instructor Interview” describes Trumbore’s use of interviews in the collegiate setting (1). A variety of assessment strategies are discussed in “Performance-Based Chemistry: Developing Assessment Strategies in High School Chemistry” (2). Wygoda and Teague provide creative alternatives such as multimedia, cartoons, inquiry, and songs for traditional activities and assessments. The authors also include a discussion of obstacles some teachers may face in using nontraditional evaluations. Periodic Properties Ideas for helping students understand periodic properties of the elements is the focus of “Periodic Table Trends”. This Idea Bank tip features a discussion by Mark Montgomery explaining how he helps students visualize trends in atomic radius and ionic radius. He suggests the use of three-dimensional models to visually help students learn periodic trends. Photographs of three-dimensional models of atomic radius and electronegativity are included. A previous JCE article, “Periodic Patterns”, examines elemental similarities other than the familiar group and period trends (3). Included are descriptions of the diagonal relationship, the (n) group and (n + 10) group similarities, and the “knight’s move” relationship. In another JCE article, Hazlehurst and Fornoff describe a process of representing periodic properties of the elements using graphing squares in each element’s block (4). It is interesting to note the inclusion of elements 89–92 in the d-block of this 1943 periodic table. Perhaps additional information on understanding the shielding effect of electrons may be helpful for some readers. The use of screening percentages rather than screening constants for studying the shielding effect of electrons in influencing trends in periodic properties is described www.JCE.DivCHED.org
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in “Screening Percentages Based on Slater Effective Nuclear Charge as a Versatile Tool for Teaching Periodic Trends” (5). The authors believe the use of screening percentages can be successfully used with multiple levels of undergraduate students and for numerous types of periodic trends. History of Chemistry In “Kekulé’s Dream and Bunsen’s Burner”, Ken Schopf presents a free, online resource on the history of science in chemistry. Schopf laments the typical textbook inclusion of chemical history or of scientists as “sidebars” or “snippets”. The article describes the Web site he created to provide numerous, free resources for teachers for incorporating interesting and relevant historical content that is aligned to standards. Schopf states that “The history of science can create a much-needed common ground between students and the subject matter and serve as a launching pad for standards-based teaching.” In this Journal, John T. Stock wrote a commentary on “The Teaching of the History of Chemistry” (6). Stock’s article recounts the results of a survey he conducted of whether 565 undergraduate institutions taught the history of chemistry. Readers interested in the history of chemistry may find the Chemical Heritage Foundation a worthy resource. The CHF Web site “…offers tools for the researcher, the students, and those who want to explore and discover how the chemical and molecular sciences have changed the world in which we live” (7). Literature Cited 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Trumbore, C. J. Chem. Educ. 1978, 55, 619. Wygoda, L.; Teague, R. J. Chem. Educ. 1995, 72, 909–911. Rayner-Canham, G. J. Chem. Educ. 2000, 77, 1053–1056. Hazlehurst, T.; Fornoff, F. J. Chem. Educ. 1943, 20, 77–79. Waldron, K.; Fehringer, E.; Streeb, A.; Trosky, J.; Pearson, J. J. Chem. Educ. 2001, 78, 635–639. 6. Stock, J. J. Chem. Educ. 2004, 81, 793–794. 7. The Chemical Heritage Foundation Web site is at http:// www.chemheritage.org (accessed Aug 2005).
Steve Long teaches at Rogers High School, Rogers, AR 72756;
[email protected].
TST Featured Articles Coan, Amy. Interview Assessment. TST 2005, 72 (3), 64–68. Montgomery, Mark. Periodic Table Trends. TST 2005, 72 (4), 50–51. Schopf, Ken. Kekulé’s Dream and Bunsen’s Burner. TST 2005, 72 (5), 30–33).
Vol. 82 No. 11 November 2005
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Journal of Chemical Education
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