Past research repeatedly revealed students' struggles to understand chemical equilibria, especially concerning their dynamic nature. Black-box simulations have proven to be helpful here. However, the effect is strongly dependent on the quality of teaching, the design principles of which are not yet fully known. One aspect of debate concerns the…

Sensemaking is an important way of learning and engaging in science. Research has shown that sensemaking activities, such as questioning, hypothesizing, and model building, are pivotal in developing critical thinking and problem-solving skills in science education. This paper investigates the role of computational simulations in facilitating…

Assessment instruments that generate quantitative data on attributes (cognitive, affective, behavioral, "etc.") of participants are commonly used in the chemistry education community to draw conclusions in research studies or inform practice. Recently, articles and editorials have stressed the importance of providing evidence for the…

This study reviewed the green and sustainable chemistry education (GSCE) research that provided training at the tertiary level from 2000 to 2024. The Web of Science and ERIC databases were screened using title and abstract review. In total, 49 studies were analysed. The analysis instrument has two main parts, namely, general characteristics of the…

Science educators have developed a variety of assessment techniques to help students connect their scientific knowledge and bridge conceptual gaps. In chemistry, concept maps and creative exercises are the two notable assessments that have been implemented into multiple chemistry courses and indicated promising effects on students' conceptual…

Much attention is given to student satisfaction in higher education, driven in the UK by accountability mechanisms such as the National Student Survey (NSS) and the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). However satisfaction is both limited and limiting, depending on students' expectations and often associated with the avoidance of difficulty and…

Science educators recognize the need to teach scientific ways of knowing and reasoning in addition to scientific knowledge. However, characterizing and assessing scientific ways of knowing and reasoning is challenging. Writing-to-learn offers one way of eliciting and supporting students' reasoning; further, writing serves to externalize and make…

Acid-base chemistry is a foundational topic that is taught in courses across the chemistry curriculum. Students often have difficulty distinguishing between the different theories of acid-base chemistry--Brønsted-Lowry and Lewis acid-base chemistry--and applying these two definitions correctly in unfamiliar scenarios. To help students learn these…

Mental modeling, which is a theory about knowledge organization, has been recently studied by science educators to examine students' understanding of scientific concepts. This qualitative study investigates undergraduate students' mental models of atomic spectra. Nine second-year physics students, who have already taken the basic chemistry and…

Attending to practice has become a significant topic in science education today. As scientific argumentation is a typical form of scientific practice as well as an important educational practice, more and more attention has been paid to it by science education researchers. Evaluating students' competence in scientific argumentation is one of the…

The purpose of this paper is to explore and explain students' achievements in solving context-based gas exercises comprising the macroscopic and submicroscopic levels of chemical concepts. The influence of specific variables, such as interest in learning, formal-reasoning abilities, and visualisation abilities, is a significant factor that should…

We report the results of a phenomenographic analysis of faculty beliefs about the purposes for teaching upper-division physical chemistry courses in the undergraduate curriculum. A purposeful sampling strategy was used to recruit a diverse group of faculty for interviews. Collectively, the participating faculty regularly teach or have taught…

This is the start of a road map for the effective introduction of inquiry-based learning in chemistry. Advantages of inquiry-based approaches to the development of scientific literacy are widely discussed in the literature. However, unless chemistry educators take account of teachers' reservations and identified disadvantages such approaches will…

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) on undergraduate students' learning about solutions and their physical properties, and on their scientific processing skills. The quasi experimental study was carried out through non-equivalent control and comparison groups pre-post test design. The data were…