Oftentimes the problems found in textbooks are too difficult for struggling students, so they get left further and further behind.  We have developed a set of exercises to bridge the gap between what a student understands and the level of difficulty of textbook problems.  These exercise sets have been designed as a supplemental resource for students taking undergraduate organic chemistry.  Collectively, the exercises cover several reactions associated with electrophilic additions to alkenes as well as two introductory topics: carbocation rearrangements and elimination reactions.  There is a heavy emphasis on mechanistic repetition as problems are presented in a �drill� type fashion to develop and strengthen pattern recognition to the �arrow-pushing� in the mechanisms of these reactions.  The problem sets are electronic and can be accessed online so students are self-guided and can move at any desired pace.  Assessment of the effectiveness of these problems was done through optional online surveys asking users to evaluate understanding and confidence of the material before and after spending time working through the problems.  Additionally, students were asked how effective they believed the tutorial to be and a practice problem was given to further assess understanding.  Overall, the results were extremely positive and showed an increase in both confidence and understanding for participating students.

Online organic chemistry exercises for alkene reactions: Design, implementation, and assessment

248th National Meeting (2014)

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