The needs of the digital revolution and the knowledge-based economy impose a transformation of traditional education to improve technical and scientific knowledge and include alternative abilities. This work presents a service-learning initiative with multiple goals: to improve scientific, technical, engineering, and mathematic (STEM) knowledge at…

Debates about how best to support students' transition from school to university have re-emerged periodically since at least the 1970s. This paper focuses upon one aspect of this transition: how to develop the quantitative skills students acquire at school throughout the first year of their degree. We report on an attempt to inject pedagogic…

Chemistry of the environment has been a long-standing and important area of scientific research. Atmospheric chemistry is of particular interest in society due to the impact that rising levels of pollutants are having on the climate. It is well-known that combustion processes create CO and NO[subscript x], which leads to the creation of other…

Nearly half of all U.S. students who declare science majors in college do not graduate with science degrees within six years. Improvements in science outcomes are linked with active-learning pedagogies such as Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs). However, despite the need for education reform particularly in Alabama,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the design of choreographies or learning environments which the students participating in "Ocean i[superscript 3]" pass through during their participation in the project, which requires constant review and interpretation, in times of COVID-19. To this end, it is proposed to: define the…

The chemistry laboratory is an impactful platform for introducing inquiry and developing science practice skills. We designed a short lab course to introduce incremental levels of inquiry, also to interconnect and integrate different domains of chemistry. Indigo dye was the central theme of this short course wherein students synthesized indigo,…

Water analysis is an excellent interdisciplinary topic for project-based learning. An undergraduate course was designed to engage the senior undergraduate chemistry students in a real-life experience. In this course, students developed methodologies based on published American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) methods for the measurement of…

Understanding how to interpret and manipulate large data sets is increasingly important today; however, this experience has been slow to trickle down to the typical undergraduate student. Here, we describe the implementation of a project-based learning experience that uses portable air sensors for the real-time measurement of carbon dioxide,…

This study explores the impact of an action-oriented environmental education course on students' environmental awareness, with 53 college students divided into experimental (N = 27) and control (N = 26) groups. Both groups participated in similar learning activities; however, the experimental group further recorded the amount of waste discharged…

"Cap and trade" is one of the most innovative policy options developed by environmental economists. By placing a cap on a social bad and allowing firms to buy and sell the right to generate it, policymakers combine government intervention with market-based incentives to improve welfare and internalize the externality. Such programs…

Saudi Arabian citizens, including university students, are in an interesting and precarious situation -- they care for sustainability, but their economy thrives because of oil production. This study used an author-developed instrument to briefly explore 135 Saudi university students' (nine disciplines) knowledge, awareness, evaluation and…

Student-generated annotated concept sketches provide an alternative approach for instructors to formatively assess students' understanding of environmental topics, such as photochemical smog and ozone layer depletion. The sketches are external representations of students' cognitive models. Results obtained from a group of 150 female students using…

These proceedings contain the papers of the 7th International Conference on Educational Technologies 2020 (ICEduTech 2020), which has been organised by the International Association for Development of the Information Society and co-organised by the University of São Paulo ("Universidade de São Paulo"), Brazil, from 5 to 7 February 2020.…

Soil biogeochemistry, a discipline that explores the chemical speciation and transformations of elements in soils and the relationships between soils and global biogeochemical cycles, is becoming a popular course offering because it unites themes from a number of other courses. In this article, we present a set of case studies that have been used…

In recent years there has been a move towards the strengthening of teaching and research links in the undergraduate curriculum. Inquiry-based learning offers an opportunity for students to engage in research tasks and consequently students can develop valuable research skills, as well as working on projects aligned to staff research interests.…