Specific heat differs from heat capacity in that specific heat deals with the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of material, while the heat capacity deals with an entire object . The specific heat is used for materials that can be easily divided into smaller quantities without altering the composition. For example, in this experiment you will look enthalpy changes involving samples of water. The advantage of using specific heat rather than heat capacity is that the specific heat is always the same for a given type of substance, whereas the heat capacity is different for each different sample. That means that you can generally look up the specific heat of a given substance in a handbook and use that value in your calculations.
Most scientists use different symbols to differentiate between specific heat and heat capacity.
Sometimes the specific heat is abbreviated as sp.ht. Sometimes, the letter q is used to represent specific heat. Unfortunately, your textbook uses a capital C to represent both specific heat and heat capacity. In this lab, I will use sp.ht. to represent specific heat. If the final temperature is lower that the initial temperature, then D T will be a negative number.