Quantitative Analysis in the General Chemistry Laboratory: Training Students To Analyze Individual Results in the Context of Collective Data

Titration experiments are ideal for generating large data sets for use in quantitative-analysis activities that are meaningful and transparent to general chemistry students. We report the successful implementation of a sophisticated quantitative exercise in which the students identify a series of unknown acids by determining their molar masses following a simple standardization exercise. The activity involves the collection and analysis of data from the entire class using standard spreadsheet software. Students deal with outliers, plot the results as a frequency histogram, and fit these histograms to normal distributions using least-squares minimization algorithms. The data-analysis skills and appreciation that are developed through the addition of this activity to a standard titration experiment can then be developed in more complex upper-level experiments for science majors.