An Exercise To Coach Students on Literature Searching

摘要

The ability to access chemical literature is an important skill for the developing chemist. Although the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University chemistry department had implemented a variety of individual exercises into the introductory course sequence to help students develop literature searching skills, second-year students still struggled with the navigation of the bewildering maze of resources, texts, and databases. This article describes an activity for organic laboratory instructors to coach students on how to prioritize and use a multitude of resources to locate a specific literature procedure. This activity is based on the idea that students find a dialogic approach to be more helpful to consolidate learning and applying knowledge.