In the organic laboratory class, students working in groups of two are assigned the task of oxidizing various substituted alkylbenzenes with potassium permanganate in basic solution. By pooling the results from all groups it is possible to illustrate for the laboratory section how a research project in chemistry can be used to answer simple questions. What happens when your individual alkylbenzene is oxidized? The data pooling allows the students to answer the following questions: Does the result of the reaction depend on the presence of other substituents on the ring? Does the result of the reaction depend on the position of the substituent? Does the result of the reaction depend on the alkyl chain length? In this way the students get a sense of how the results reported in textbooks are derived from the literature.
Supplement
Notes for the instructor and instructions for the students are available.
Our Secondary School editors work hard to distill all the JCE materials to produce a fraction of particular interest to high school teachers. We call it CLIC.
In recent years we have worked hard to better match our advertisers with our readers. When shopping for chemistry education materials, visit our advertisers' WWW sites first.
Take JCE along on your outreach missions. Copies of the Journal, guest access to JCE Online, our publications catalog, and more are available for your participants.