There currently exists a significant deficiency in the nuclear chemistry workforce within the United States, despite its importance in areas of medicine, national security, and energy. Poor coverage of this topic across many chemistry departments at the undergraduate level likely contributes to this shortage. Increasing interest and hands-on…

Understanding social interactions among students comprises a rich area of physics education research. Here we focus on the social interactions in introductory physics laboratories (labs). Most existing research in such contexts focuses on within-group social dynamics, however, we argue that interactions between different lab groups are just as…

Pedagogical approaches for supporting students' argumentative writing in science laboratories have not been fully established. This article examines the development of argumentative abilities in undergraduate students enrolled in chemistry laboratory courses that employed two teaching sequences: (i) an argumentative writing workshop for conceptual…

As the COVID-19 pandemic transformed higher education, St. John's University (New York), among other academic institutions, worked to incorporate methodologies that would allow for social distancing and the attainment of hands-on experience that is expected of a science laboratory course. To account for the constraints that the pandemic posed, St.…

Using a qualitative approach based on grounded theory, this study explored the best practices of educational technology implementation in 2-year community college writing centers utilizing interviews with writing center administrators. Sociocultural development theory, as well as social learning theory, were applied to frame the results. Each…

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) hold significant promise for improving physics education research that uses machine learning. In this study, we compare the application of various models for conducting a large-scale analysis of written text grounded in a physics education research classification problem: identifying skills in…

In this article, we describe a fully computational laboratory exercise that results in an increase of students' understanding of what quantum chemical geometry optimization calculations are doing to find minimum energy structures. This laboratory exercise was conducted several times over multiple years at a small private undergraduate institution,…

Teaching green chemistry within the K-12 classroom has a positive impact on attitudes and perceptions of chemistry in society for future scientists and professionals, resulting in safer, less hazardous chemistry experiments and demonstrations. The state of New York has taken advantage of the benefits that green chemistry provide in the classroom…

Using a qualitative approach based on grounded theory, this study explored the best practices of educational technology implementation in 2-year community college writing centers through a series of interviews with 13 separate 2-year community college writing center administrators. This study utilized Vygotsky's (1978) sociocultural development…

Frogs are routinely used in physiology teaching laboratories to demonstrate important physiological processes. There have been recent directives that promote the use of the anesthetic MS-222 (tricaine methanesulfonate), rather than lowering body temperature with a cold water bath to prepare reptiles and amphibians for physiological experiments or…

It is challenging to identify the needs of researchers and students at any satellite campus, a situation that is exacerbated when the satellite campus is a research laboratory. The users are not taking classes, but still have library support needs. This article discusses the difficulties in properly identifying a population of students at this…

Carbon nanomaterials have promising utility in chemical sensing including applications in preserving occupational safety, monitoring of environmental pollution, and human health. While recent advances in device fabrication and molecular design of functional materials have enabled rapid fabrication of chemical sensors from carbon nanomaterials,…

As physics laboratory courses (labs) transition from traditional, model-verifying activities to discovery-based investigations, it becomes crucial to understand the role of the instructor in the implementation of various lab types. Prior work has started to address this need by examining either coarse-grained frequencies or fine-grained content of…

Under the new ABET accreditation framework, students are expected to demonstrate "an ability to develop and conduct appropriate experimentation, analyze and interpret data, and use engineering judgment to draw conclusions." Traditional, recipe-based labs provide few opportunities for students to engage in realistic experimental design or…

With the adoption of instructional laboratories that require students to make their own decisions, there is a need to better understand students' activities as they make sense of their data and decide how to proceed. In particular, understanding when students do not engage productively with unexpected data may provide insights into how to better…