Development and implementation of a case study assessment using biobased 5-hydroxymethylfurfural to teach redox reactions in undergraduate organic courses

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the development and evaluation of a case study designed to introduce both the core chemistry concepts of oxidation and reduction reactions as well as green chemistry within the undergraduate organic chemistry curriculum. The developed case study consisted of two parts that can be used in tandem or independently. Part 1 focused on calculating oxidation states and determining whether the provided bioderived reactions represented oxidation or reduction reactions, and Part 2 focused on evaluating the greenness of oxidation reactions. Students reported positive learning gains for both the core chemistry concepts of oxidation and reduction reactions and green chemistry and reported that they viewed the case study favorably. It is our hope that other educators use this case study module to incorporate green chemistry into their organic courses and use its development as inspiration to create further case studies that integrate green chemistry into the curriculum.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Organic chemistry
• case study
• green curriculum
• redox reactions
• assessment of students

Acknowledgements

The first author acknowledges the NDSU DBER Education Fellowship. The authors wish to thank the students who participated in this project. We would also like to thank Megan Wolf for her work on developing the Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) questions used in the post-test. We would also like to thank James Nyachwaya, Ariana McDarby, Evan Culver, Spencer Gilman, and Annie Schiro for their feedback on the iterations of the case study. Finally, we would like to thank Kristina Caton from the NDSU Center for Writers for her help with revising the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Research presented in this paper was supported by the National Science Foundation (DUE-2021285) and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry of North Dakota State University, and under EPSCoR Track-1 Cooperative Agreement OIA #1946202. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. In part, this research was also supported by NDSU's NDUS ECOR Award FAR0035075.