A short biography of chemist Fritz Haber is used to personalize the abstract concepts of equilibrium chemistry for high school students in an introductory course. In addition to giving the Haber–Bosch process an historic, an economic, and a scientific background the reading and subsequent discussion allows students for whom the human perspective is of paramount importance a chance to investigate the irony of balance or equilibrium in Haber's life story. Since the inclusion of the Haber biography, performance in the laboratory and on examinations for those students who are usually only partially engaged has dramatically improved.
More Information
Citation
Glickstein, Neil. J. Chem. Educ.2005 82 391.
Keywords
Equilibrium; History / Philosophy; Interdisciplinary / Multidisciplinary; Introductory / High School Chemistry
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.