Theoretical Chemistry Course for Students in Chemistry

TL;DR

This paper reformulates a theoretical chemistry course to enhance understanding of chemical reactions from micro to macro levels, improving student comprehension and critical thinking through innovative content and assessment methods.

Contribution

It introduces a new integrated theoretical chemistry curriculum linking physics and chemistry, with assessment tools demonstrating improved student learning outcomes.

Findings

Students showed significant improvement in understanding TC concepts.

Approximately two-thirds of students learned new knowledge.

Students effectively grasped complex theoretical concepts.

Abstract

In this work, the teaching content of a theoretical-chemistry (TC) course is reformed, establishing a theoretical contents from micro- to macro-system, and comprehensively introducing the theory of chemical reaction to undergraduate students in chemistry. In order to develop such TC course based on the general physical-chemistry course, we focus on the last-mile problem between the physics and chemistry courses to train the critical thinking of undergraduate students in chemistry. To clearly show this, a reduction scheme of polymer molecular dynamics was discussed as an example, which shows a different theoretical content in polymer chemistry. Moreover, we propose a series of experiences and dependent measures that can provide information regarding students' levels of knowledge and understanding. This assessment quiz was designed to test students on the fundamental concepts and applications of TC, such as dynamics, statistical ensemble, kinetics, and so on. From the actual teaching for 36 students, it was found that these students performed significantly improvement from the present TC content. Further analysis of each individual question revealed that approximately two-third of the students learn new knowledge. Although the present TC course might be considered to be a certain degree of difficulty for chemists, these analyses show that students can effectively accept these complicated concepts.