Chemistry Matters is a program of study based on two premises: learning ideas and concepts is best achieved through repeated practice, over the period of a chemistry course students develop their abilities to use ideas and concepts to account for chemical phenomena.
Repeated practice, in a context in which chemical theories and models are presented sequentially, is the best strategy to ensure students leave a chemistry course with ability and knowledge. By developing the theoretical foundations of energetics, bonding models and kinetcs at increasing levels of complexity, the text ensures that students practice the ideas they are introduced to throughout their course. An idea or concept met on a single occasion is unlikely to have a lasting effect.
Mastering any skill or ability takes time and practice and this includes the frequently counter intuitive ideas used to account for chemical phenomena. Relating composition, structure and change to the behavior of atoms, ions and molecules is not common to everyday experience of the world. Atoms, ions and molecules behave very differently to the objects we see, fell and handle every day. The theories and models constructed to make sense of their behavior do not connect with the way we make sense of the world around us.
By developing and integrating concepts in a range of situations; environmental systems, biochemistry, industry, analysis, medicine and physiology, students explore and use chemistry in situations that matter to themselves and to society as a whole.
Recurring concepts, models and themes are the threads which integrate the text. Energetics threads through the text in contexts ranging from respiration and photosynthesis to nuclear power plants and batteries, to end with predictions based in the Second Law of thermodynamics. Water, together with carbon and its compounds, are the threads around which bonding models and the relationships between composition, structure and change are explored. Water's omnipresent role in chemistry is also explored in acid base and redox reactions. The Periodic Table is an ever present backcloth to relate reactions met in descriptive chemistry. Kinetics, initially introduced as collision theory to rationalize experimental data, is the thread that runs through reaction mechanisms and the role of enzymes in biological systems. |
