Real name:
First Name:
heather
Last Name:
schenck
Position:
professor
Teaching Interests:
I teach first semester organic for chemistry & biochemistry majors, as well as the one semester organic course for non-majors. I also teach organic laboratory courses, primarily the non-majors lab (which I redesigned in 2019 to increase application-based experiments and decrease synthesis). I also teach an upper level elective on spectroscopy for organic molecules (primarily NMR); this course includes a lab in which I designed all of the experiments. In the lab portion of the elective, students do 2D NMR, selective NMR, NMR kinetics (EXSY), and an equilibrium study of association behavior using NMR and IR.
3 years 2 months
Research Interests:
Pedagogy enhancements for large organic lectures to increase student success. I am now revising a manuscript to publish results of a multi-year study in which a change I made in mechanism pedagogy was correlated with a halving of drops/Ds/Fs (from 32% to 16.5%) and a ~70% reduction in errors in use of curved arrows. I hope to test methods to help students succeed better remembering reactions in future years. I also won first prize last fall for a proposed smart phone app design in the WiSys APPStart competition. My proposal is for a smart phone app to help students master cyclohexane chair drawings. I will be seeking funding to code and release the app starting in 2023.
City:
LA CROSSE
Zip Code (or country if not USA):
54601
State (USA only):
WI
Affiliation:
university of wisconsin - la crosse
Institution Website URL: