By hosting a college students' laboratory skills contest, we provide an interesting activity for students to cultivate good laboratory practices and thereby improve their laboratory skills. The substance of this contest is the detection of the hardness of water, which involves numerous laboratory skills such as solution preparation, weight by…

In undergraduate science education, laboratory courses stand as essential cornerstones of experiential learning. Chemistry laboratory courses offer students unique hands-on experiences that bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application. The journey through the undergraduate chemistry curriculum is paved with a series of…

In order to evaluate students' development of scientific competence at the intermediate level, a guided-inquiry course was developed to increase student independence, including opportunities for project ownership and significant collaborative learning expectations. A survey was developed to assess students' experiences learning the scientific…

The Survey of Physics Reasoning on Uncertainty Concepts in Experiments (SPRUCE) was designed to measure students' proficiency with measurement uncertainty concepts and practices across ten different assessment objectives to help facilitate the improvement of laboratory instruction focused on this important topic. To ensure the reliability and…

Due to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), universities were restricted from gathering students for in-person instruction, especially teaching hands-on techniques in microbiology laboratory courses. This report describes how a Hispanic-serving institution (HSI) transitioned to remote learning for microbiology laboratories through a model, PRUTE,…

Descriptive statistics involves summarizing and organizing data so that they can be easily understood. Even though these are basic and simple concepts, many applied science students have misconceptions about their use in applied experiments in the laboratory. Students usually receive limited or no training in how to understand the meaning of the…

Current research suggests that students often fail to focus equally on the three aspects of scientific argumentation (cognitive, epistemic, and social) when they are given an opportunity to engage in argumentation. This study examined student argumentation within a two-semester general chemistry laboratory sequence at East Carolina University to…

Practical classes are an important and essential part of undergraduate programs in Chemical Engineering, as each experiment provides an opportunity to reinforce the theory of discrete unit operations that are taught elsewhere in the course. While an expensive pedagogical method, when practical sessions are delivered well, they can be one of the…