Welcome Students!
We are passionate believers in open educational resources (OER) and made the move to an OER textbook for our general chemistry courses a few years ago. One of the key things our students wanted, in addition to a free textbook, was access to practice problems with solutions beyond what we provided in our courses. Doing homework problems helps you practice your skills and reinforce your understanding of chemistry concepts — so this is important!
When we searched online, we found lots of OER repositories for practice questions, but while some questions had answers, not many had solutions. That discovery led us down the path to figuring out the best approach to create the PASS solutions in this book. We designed them so YOU can choose how much help you need to answer the question. You can check your answer, see the steps to get the answer or work through the guided solution, which provides the same kind of ‘teacher-talk’ we would use if you were sitting with us in our offices or explaining the approach to solving the problem in lecture.
We hope this helps you build your confidence in working through these practice chemistry problems!
You can find more information on how to use this book in the How to Use This Book section.
Happy studying!
Cheers, Sharon & Lindsay
Information for Educators
The PASS (Platform Adapted Strategic Solutions) Framework was developed in 2021 with the help of a grant (see Acknowledgements) to provide a literature-based approach for solving practice problems in general chemistry within the realm of open educational resources (OER). The PASS project focuses on finding, collecting, adapting/revising (where needed) and creating automated digital Chemistry solutions and feedback for OER practice problems for first-year Chemistry Courses using the PASS Framework.
Using the PASS Framework, we developed this PASSchem solutions collection, which features templated solutions tailored for general chemistry problems found in first-year courses at Thompson Rivers University (TRU) and modified for use on the Pressbooks platform. The goal is to provide students with questions and systematic solutions for open problems to support their individual formative assessment. Each solution follows a scaffolded template designed to allow students to choose the level of support they need as they work through practice questions, which provide formative feedback and guidance.
