  In this work, the teaching content of a theoretical-chemistry (TC) course is
reformed, establishing a theoretical contents from micro- to macro-system, and
comprehensively introducing the theory of chemical reaction to undergraduate
students in chemistry. In order to develop such TC course based on the general
physical-chemistry course, we focus on the last-mile problem between the
physics and chemistry courses to train the critical thinking of undergraduate
students in chemistry. To clearly show this, a reduction scheme of polymer
molecular dynamics was discussed as an example, which shows a different
theoretical content in polymer chemistry. Moreover, we propose a series of
experiences and dependent measures that can provide information regarding
students' levels of knowledge and understanding. This assessment quiz was
designed to test students on the fundamental concepts and applications of TC,
such as dynamics, statistical ensemble, kinetics, and so on. From the actual
teaching for 36 students, it was found that these students performed
significantly improvement from the present TC content. Further analysis of each
individual question revealed that approximately two-third of the students learn
new knowledge. Although the present TC course might be considered to be a
certain degree of difficulty for chemists, these analyses show that students
can effectively accept these complicated concepts.
