The questions in the practice assignments given to students in the form of worksheets or other formats are often grouped by chapter, topic, or concepts. There is a great emphasis on categorization. Most of the end-of-chapter problems in chemistry textbooks are organized by sections. Although this was done with the intention of helping students…

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 led to a widespread transition from traditional face-to-face instruction to remote learning during the 2020-2021 academic year. The lack of in-person instruction posed unique challenges, particularly for students transitioning from high school to college, exacerbating existing educational…

Artificial photosynthesis is a promising approach to generate commodity chemicals using abundant chemical feedstocks and renewable energy sources. Despite its importance, affordable and effective hands-on classroom activities that demonstrate artificial photosynthesis and teach key concepts, especially for primary school students, are lacking.…

Success in chemistry requires not only the ability to recruit prior knowledge but also the ability to establish strong connections between new and existing concepts to form knowledge clusters around core principles. How these knowledge structures are organized can be used to understand the relationships between concepts within a student's mind.…

Summative lab assessments probe student mastery over concepts, but conventional ones often result in decreased student engagement and confidence. If conventional summative lab assessments are replaced by accessible gamified evaluations, such as online escape rooms, this leads to improved student engagement and confidence. In this work, we adapted…

There is an urgent need for more Latinx students to pursue careers in STEM related fields as this has historically been an unserved population in schools. This mixed methods study examined the impact of a summer STEM pipeline program focused on hands-on chemistry concepts for 28 Latinx students in the 5th grade. Findings include statistically…

A new teaching assistant model was adopted and qualitatively assessed for the general chemistry laboratory, in which both an undergraduate and a graduate teaching assistant provided instruction to students during the lab. Verbal interactions between graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants were recorded, transcribed, and coded using the…

Many college students, especially first-generation and underrepresented racial/ethnic minority students, desire courses and careers that emphasize helping people and society. Can instructors of introductory science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses promote motivation, performance, and equity in STEM fields by emphasizing the…

Chemistry is traditionally perceived as difficult to comprehend. Its mastery requires that a variety of concepts be linked to form an organized knowledge system. The connections need to be made not only between the concepts associated with the macroscopic level of the chemistry triplet but also between the submicroscopic and symbolic levels. Many…

Students' decisions to enter or persist in STEM courses is linked with their affective domain. The influence of factors impacting students' affective domain in introductory college chemistry classes, such as attitude, is often overlooked by instructors, who instead focus on students' mathematical abilities as sole predictors of academic…

Collaborative learning involves an interdependence between success of the individual and success of the group, requiring both personal preparation and teamwork. Asynchronous work, in combination with group interaction and problem solving, differentiates collaborative learning from other interactive teaching methods. In this study, three professors…

Cross-connections between the sciences and mathematics are emphasized through the Next Generation Science Standards and the Common Core State Standards in the United States. One topic that is a common bridge between math and science is the concept of measurement and unit conversions in the metric/English system. This article uses a mixed-methods…

To address high STEM college attrition rates, it is critical to understand what motivates undergraduates' pursuit of STEM. The current study investigated the association of a diverse socio-demographic background with different types of perceived chemistry career affordances (prosocial, other communal, and agentic) and their association with…

This paper describes a method for determination of trihalomethanes (THMs) in drinking water via solid-phase microextraction (SPME) GC/MS as a means to develop and improve student understanding of the use of GC/MS for qualitative and quantitative analysis. In the classroom, students are introduced to SPME, GC/MS instrumentation, and the use of MS…

We evaluate the effectiveness of companion classes designed to support at-risk first-year students in introductory biology and chemistry within the University of California system. Companion classes (co-classes) are optional classes associated with large, gateway biology and chemistry courses (parent classes) and provide three hours of instruction…