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New Year, New Format

Happy New Year! For many, the beginning of a new year involves creating resolutions. And, hopefully not quitting them! Something I have resolved to do is modify the presentation and submission of lab reports.

JCE 91.12—December 2014 Issue Highlights

Celebrating the International Year of Crystallography The December 2014 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education is now available for subscribers online at http://pubs.acs.org/toc/jceda8/91/12. The December issue includes content on: crystallography, assessment, career development for undergraduates, problem solving in organic chemistry, and teaching physical chemistry. This latest issue of JCE plus the content of all past issues, volumes 1 through 91, are available at http://pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc.

NGSS Update #2

Happy December ChemEdX community! On December 2, 2014 I attended the second of three workshops on NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards) through our local ISD (in Kalamazoo County it is known as KRESA).

Is the MSDS Sheet a useful document for a chemistry teacher?

Whenever a serious incident takes place in a school chemistry laboratory or classroom, fire and safety officers often pontificate on the incident by quoting the Materials Safety Data Sheet (MSDS). However, how many of you have read such documents in full? In UK schools we have perhaps 200 to 400 chemicals on the shelves. Have you read the MSDSs for each chemical?

Conceptual Chemistry

In a recent contribution to ChemEd X "Stoichiometry is Easy", the author states that he has "vacillated over the years between using an algorithmic method, and an inquiry-based approach to teaching stoichiometry. " I would like to suggest that there is another approach to mastering stoichiometry and that it should precede the algorithmic one: it is the conceptual approach based on a particle model to represent the species involved in chemical reactions.