Interdisciplinary Teaching Strategy in the Development of Chemical Courses

Today interdisciplinary teaching and research are already strong and important aspects requested for solving questions. In this context, individual disciplines do not consider all the aspects of a complex problem and interdisciplinary courses and programs may help in facilitating or enhancing the transfer of higher-order cognitive skills (HOCS) such as: critical thinking, problem solving, decision-making and laboratory practice. In this paper, we report a systematic integration of three undergraduate chemistry courses: Chemistry of Natural Products (QPN), Laboratory of Organic Chemistry 2 (LQO2), and Laboratory Analytical Chemistry 1 (LQA1). By choosing a common topic, we prepared a series of activities focused in interdisciplinary interaction and the development of students' HOCS.