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The educational value of encouraging students to integrate their learning across the sub discipline of chemistry, has been the subject of considerable comment by both the National Science Foundation, Division of Undergraduate Education in Washington, D. C., and The Royal Society of Chemistry Chemical Education Research Group. Indeed national scientific bodies globally have urged tertiary institutions to provide undergraduates with a more realistic and research oriented view of experimental science.
This unified microscale laboratory program is intended to build independence, confidence and even adventurousness both in synthesis and instrumental analysis, and to apply these results in a meaningful situation by demanding of the students: interpretation of results, evaluation of data and conclusion reached, reference to the original literature, and suggestion of further experimentation. Such an approach not only forms the basis of experimental investigative science, and self-education since it allows the students longer contact time with the project's reaction and instrumental analytical sequences, thus not allowing them to derive some familiarity, empathy and enthusiasm for what may be a new subject but also to elicit the excitement of constructive investigative science.
The costs and safety benefits offered by microscale chemistry have done much to facilitate such a change in teaching philosophy. In this paper we provide an insight into one such unified microscale project, in an area of chemical research which was spawned over one hundred years and which is still actively researched today, but which can also be participated in and contributed to by undergraduate students.
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