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This paper describes a first-year general chemistry laboratory that uses NMR spectroscopy and model building to emphasize molecular shape and structure. It is appropriate for either a traditional or an atoms-first curriculum. Students learn the basis of structure and the use of NMR data through a cooperative learning hands-on laboratory experience, and work in groups to assign names and structures to unknown compounds. This laboratory can be successfully run at a number of experimental levels, from students preparing their own NMR samples for analysis to running this as a dry laboratory with spectra provided by the instructor.

Our Introduction to Research Methods course is a first-year majors course built around the idea of helping students learn to work like chemists, write like chemists, and think like chemists. We have developed this course as a hybrid hands-on/ lecture experience built around instrumentation use and report preparation. We take the product from one of our general chemistry laboratories, the synthesis of aspirin, which is characterized qualitatively (FeCl 3 , FT-IR) in the laboratory sequence and we characterize it quantitatively ( 1 H and 13 C NMR, GC−MS) as part of the majors course. We want to give the students the opportunity to generate as much data from their aspirin sample as we possibly can, since the data and the spectra allow students to begin to think like chemists and use the methods by which we "see" (visualize and study) molecules. Students prepare an ACS-style laboratory report detailing the synthesis and spectroscopic analysis of aspirin. The laboratory report is prepared in stages, where each procedure is discussed as a class as to why we performed it, what it indicates, what it does not indicate, and what it means overall. The course ends with the presentation of a research proposal where they design the synthesis of a target ester and anticipate the results of qualitative tests for the proposed synthetic product as well as predict what the spectra will look like. This process of report writing and proposal presentation has resulted in students being more confident and ready to enter the organic chemistry sequence and participate in research in our laboratories.

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