The goal of this paper will be to tie together three seemingly unrelated streams of scholarly work in our group. The first involves examples that can be used to demonstrate to students that physical chemistry deals with models and modeling. The second looks at research devoted to obtaining a better understanding of how students learn quantum mechanics, which was reported in the ACS Symposium volume on Advances in Teaching Physical Chemistry. The third extends our work on symbolic versus verbal/linguistic representations to understanding the first author's experiences teaching physical chemistry to about 65 students from the life sciences, per year, for more than 15 years.

Physical chemistry: Teaching for understanding

246th National Meeting (2013)

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