New Lesson on Amount of Substance and Mole Completes BLOSSOMS Teaching Unit for Chemistry Classes

Publication Date: 
May 8, 2017

The mole concept pervades all of chemistry. Since most quantitative chemical calculations are based on this concept, an understanding of the mole is essential to the study of chemistry. A new BLOSSOMS lesson is designed to help students understand this difficult concept by using concrete models/examples and analogies that are familiar to the students and by conducting simple and fun activities. After this two-part lesson, students should understand the concept of “amount of substance” and “mole” and will be able to explain why these two concepts are important and how they link the invisible micro-world to the observable macro-world. They should also be able to do conversions between the number of the elementary entities, amount of substance, and mass by using Avogadro’s number and molar mass as conversion factors. This new lesson, in concert with two other BLOSSOMS lessons, How Big Is a Mole? Do We Really Comprehend Avogadro’s Number? and Stoichiometry, provide high school teachers with a unit on this fundamental chemistry topic that is both comprehensive and also highly accessible due to the BLOSSOMS unique active learning pedagogy. Watch this new lesson here.