Teaching the Sophomore Organic Course without a Lecture. Are You Crazy?

514 Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 79 No. 4 April 2002 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu There are several reports in the literature on efforts to use cooperative learning in general and physical chemistry (1, 2). Fewer attempts have been made in organic chemistry, although the Workshop Chemistry Project of the Rochester group is a notable exception (3). In this paper we provide a description of cooperative learning in the organic course in which the lecture component diminishes in the first semester and essentially vanishes in the second. It is surely legitimate to ask straightaway what we can possibly add to the already prolific, if not prolix discourse. We see two possibilities. First, our venue is the sophomore organic course (4 ), notoriously difficult and pressure-packed. Is this any place in which to experiment? Second, in year one of our cooperative course we were able to control our experiment in a way that we think has not been done before and which is therefore unusually informative. So we hope that this report will be more than an anecdotal description, will break some new ground, and will point the way for future improvement.