Chemistry Core Standards

These core standards are the overriding principles under which all of the Indiana Chemistry CORE 40 standards fit.  These power standards are non-negotiable in that they will allow students to be successful learners (and to be successful at the post-secondary level), they are enduring over time and they support learning in other content-specific areas.

1. Students will learn to think critically and scientifically in order to understand and analyze fundamental chemistry principles.

2. Students will use the tools of mathematics to solve chemistry problems.

3. Students will communicate effectively in order to both receive and disseminate information, to understand others’ ideas and to have their ideas understood.

NOTE: Next to each standard listed below, you will see a column in blue which refers to the chapter and section numbers referenced in the textbook, Glencoe Chemistry: Matter and Change (2005).  Please also note that ALL students in chemistry (regardless of the instructor) follow the exact same schedule as posted on the ChemCentral website.  The chemistry instructors work collaboratively on ALL work assigned and all assessments (both formative and summative) are given in common to all chemistry sections.

* indicates a Chemistry Core Standard

Principles of Chemistry

Students begin to conceptualize the general structure of the atom and the roles played by the main parts of the atom in determining the properties of materials. They investigate, through such methods as laboratory work, the nature of chemical changes and the role of energy in those changes.  

Historical Perspectives of Chemistry

Students gain understanding of how the scientific enterprise operates through examples of historical events. Through the study of these events, students understand that new ideas are limited by the context in which they are conceived, that these ideas are often rejected by the scientific establishment, that these ideas sometimes spring from unexpected findings, and that these ideas grow or transform slowly through the contributions of many different investigators.

C.2.1	Pages 63-64	Show that Antoine Lavoisier invented a whole new field of science based on a theory of materials, physical laws, and quantitative methods, with the conservation of matter at its core. Recognize that he persuaded a generation of scientists that his approach accounted for the experimental results better than other chemical systems.
C.2.2	Pages 151-152	Show Lavoisier’s system for naming substances and describing their reactions contributed to the rapid growth of chemistry by enabling scientists everywhere to share their findings about chemical reactions with one another without ambiguity.
C.2.3	Page 87-90	Show that John Dalton’s modernization of the ancient Greek ideas of element, atom, compound, and molecule strengthened the new chemistry by providing physical explanations for reactions that could be expressed in quantitative terms.
C.2.4	Page 698	Explain how Frederich Wohler’s synthesis of the simple organic compound urea from inorganic substances made it clear that living organisms carry out chemical processes not fundamentally different from inorganic chemical processes. Describe how this discovery led to the development of the huge field of organic chemistry, the industries based on it, and eventually to the field of biochemistry.
C.2.5*	Page 597-598	Explain how Arrhenius’s discovery of the nature of ionic solutions contributed to the understanding of a broad class of chemical reactions.
C.2.6	Pages 129-132	Explain that the appreciation of the laws of quantum mechanics to chemistry by Linus Pauling and others made possible an understanding of chemical reactions on the atomic level.
C.2.7	Page 789	Describe how the discovery of the structure of DNA by James D.Watson and Francis Crick made it possible to interpret the genetic code on the basis of a sequence of “letters”.