Virginia Instructional Review

A Natural Approach to Chemistry gives students the opportunity to do chemistry, not just read about it. In this program students learn the science to understand how chemistry is relevant to their lives.

The developers saw an opportunity in chemistry curricula, with students using college books that were written at the wrong reading level for them, emphasizing problem-solving without spending enough time on conceptualizing the big picture of chemistry. They felt chemistry instruction needed examples in order to make connections with students, it must be experienced at an appropriate level, and it must be relevant to their lives. In the end the program aims to teach students by posing a question, showing them how to investigate and solve problems without giving them the answers.

The central premise of A Natural Approach to Chemistry is that chemistry is all around each of us, every day. Chemistry is us. We eat chemistry. We drink chemistry. Chemistry is the complex choreography of atoms and molecules that sustain life. Chemistry is both how we create the materials of human technology, and also how the natural world builds and renews itself.

In the Engage component of the 5E Model, the introductory investigation lays the foundation for the content to be presented to the students. The second page of each chapter shows an unusual or paradoxical experiment - with photographs. More importantly, most chapters begin with an “A” investigation. The “A” investigation is designed to be the primary engagement activity for the content of the chapter. It is taught before the student has formal exposure to the content through lessons or readings. This keeps curiosity as a motivating factor because the students do not know what is going to happen.

In the development of each investigation, A Natural Approach To Chemistry starts out with the problem statement and system definition followed by pre-laboratory questions at various degrees of complexity. It then guides the students through the typical experiment and data collection. After that follows the analysis of data and the critical questions about the observation and the relation of data to observations.

Finally, open questions that motivate the development of derivative experiments are introduced and the relation of the particular investigation to familiar life experiences is elucidated.

The Lab-Master is an innovative, easy-to-use, probeware system consisting of an integrated  RGB spectrophotometer, temperature probe, and voltage probe. Instead of an open flame the Lab-Master system uses a safe, electric control-point heater to heat solutions in test tubes.