Organic Chemistry II students at the University of Indianapolis are required to write a peer-reviewed, scientific term paper based on an organic chemistry reaction sequence found in the primary literature.  The goals of this assignment are to support the students' development as analytical thinkers and as effective communicators in the field.  To complete this Semester II assignment, students search the literature to find an organic synthesis paper containing at least a 5-step reaction sequence.  Their analysis includes a determination of the mechanism of each step, and the final product is a detailed mechanistic paper using computer-drawn chemical structures and appropriate scientific terminology.  In recent years, our efforts have focused on providing a guided approach to introducing this type of technical writing through a detailed Semester I skills exercise, which provides a step-wise series of assignments based on a journal article common to all students.  This class-wide Semester I assignment is designed to ease the transition to the independent work required for Semester II, in which students find a unique journal article in the chemical literature and complete an independent analysis as the basis of their Semester II term paper.  Our current efforts have focused on developing a parallel scaffolding and step-wise approach for the Semester II assignment.  The Semester II assignment now has a progressive set of tasks, including:  locating an appropriate journal article in the ACS database, downloading the paper and relevant supporting information, expanding chemical abbreviations, researching named reactions, providing lists of all reagents found in the experimental sections of the paper and supporting information, creating computer-generated schemes of the reaction mechanism, and participating in a peer review process.  The results of the improved Semester II support for learning, as well as the future ideas for the development of the skills exercise, will be presented.

Ongoing development of a skills exercise for organic literature reading and analysis

246th National Meeting (2013)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.