In this laboratory activity, students were tasked with determining the heat of combustion for each of three common sugar substitutes: saccharin, aspartame, and sucralose. The heats of combustion were determined via three different methods: bomb calorimetry, heats of formation derived from semiempirical calculations, and tabulated average bond…

This paper describes the collaboration of a Writing Center director and a professor of a Fisheries Biology course in support of a research paper entitled, "The World Without," which asks students to convince readers of the likely ecological consequences associated with the extinction of a finfish species or aquatic habitat. Opportunities…

Research on student learning in organic chemistry indicates that students tend to focus on surface level features of molecules with less consideration of implicit properties when engaging in mechanistic reasoning. Writing-to-learn (WTL) is one approach for supporting students' mechanistic reasoning. A variation of WTL incorporates peer review and…

Asking students to explain why phenomena occur at a molecular level is vital to increasing their understanding of chemistry concepts. One way to elicit students' mechanistic reasoning and guide construction of knowledge is through Writing-to-Learn (WTL), which is a promising approach for students in organic chemistry courses. In the design of WTL…

Writing conferences are rich pedagogical settings to explore explanations. In contrast to teachers, writing consultants are usually peer tutors, straddling the roles of instructor and fellow student (North, 1984). This creates a unique situation where consultant-writer dyads must interactionally manage questions of expertise and authority (Carino,…