Most organic chemistry textbooks present an overview of functional groups according to the functional relationships among them. They make no explicit connection to the periodic table. Beginning students need course material that connects to their knowledge structure. The periodic table is a well-known scaffold to which functional groups and their ionic variants can easily be related. Some textbooks, such as Solomons and Fiyhle (1), present a summary of formal charges of typical organic chemistry atoms organized according to the groups of the periodic table. However, the functional groups in which these atoms occur are not explicitly indicated. This way of presenting the material is too abstract for many students. They need something more concrete It is also important to discuss the logic behind the functionalities as was demonstrated by Byrd and Hildreth's dichotomous classification key (2).
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