A new higher education curriculum in organic chemistry: what questions should be asked ?

International audienceOrganic chemistry is often considered to be a difficult subject to teach and to learn, particularly as students prefer to resort to memorization alone rather than reasoning using models from chemical reactivity. Existing studies have led us to suggest principles for redefining the curriculum, ranging from its overall structure to the tasks given to the students. We suggest reorganizing the content around the organic chemist's questions and even in the first year implementing teaching based on modeling, organic synthesis, and using a database (the "reaction library") in class. Finally, we present a full curriculum reconciling these principles with the current content of an organic chemistry course. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ed300746e Keywords: First-Year Undergraduate/General; Second-Year Undergraduate; High School/Introductory Chemistry; Chemical Education Research; Curriculum; Organic Chemistry; Enrichment/Review Materials; Mechanisms of Reactions; Synthesi