Stephen L. MacNeil

Metacognition is a fundamental skill that allows advanced learners to adapt to diverse learning environments. Metacognition, however, can be domain specific and students may fail to generalize metacognitive skills across domains. Thus, students in higher education may require specific training to acquire relevant metacognitive skills in differing domains or may need cueing to engage their metacognitive skills and knowledge in new domains. The present report describes the development of a co-curricular metacognitive program for chemistry students and suggests how this program could be adopted by other chemistry courses or adapted for other domains in higher education. Several supports were introduced in this program including self-assessment of competence with learning task inventories (LTIs; i.e., detailed lists of learning tasks), self-assessments of confidence regarding in-class content questions, and performance predictions and postdictions on tests. In general, exposure to these supports resulted in overall performance and confidence gains. However, individual differences were evident with some students demonstrating greater learning gains than others. Initial Dunning-Kruger effects associated with pre-and postdictions, with low-performing students overestimating grades and high-performing students underestimating grades, decreased over exposure. A summary of the evolution of this metacognitive co-curricular program, the educational literature that steered it, and the differential impact on students is explained.

You have probably learned about elimination reactions involving alkyl halides leading to the formation of alkenes. A typical example is shown in Scheme 17.2.1.

Sixteen new ionic liquids, including three room temperature ionic liquids, possessing cations derived from monoquaternization of DABCO have been identified through systematic variation of cation alkyl chain length and anion structure. The DABCO salts are obtained in good to excellent yields and show melting point trends, with respect to cation alkyl chain length, consistent with those reported for the imidazolium series of ionic liquids.