This paper describes the formation and ongoing efforts of a collaborative partnership between students, faculty, and staff within the Chemistry department at Amherst College. Formation of the group was inspired by calls for structural, inclusive, change from students, faculty, and alumni. There are many benefits to collaborating across traditional…

Complex problem solving is one of the skills desired in the 21st century workforce. Students can improve their problem-solving skills by working on homework problems, and creating new problems can be a stimulating and inventive exercise for student as well. Our previous studies explored the impacts of a novel homework pedagogy where students…

Medicinal chemistry, as the core curriculum of the pharmaceutical engineering major, contains complex knowledge systems and scattered knowledge points. A medicinal chemistry course covers more than 50kinds of drugs divided into 11 categories including antibiotics, antiparasitic drugs, anesthetics, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and nervous…

The perception of 3D features from 2D representations depend on their number of salient features, recognizable canonical axes, and orientations. Informed by form-perception literature, we proposed a hexagonal prism as an external reference frame to identify positions of elements in relation to each other and the observer when studying Diels-Alder…

Our organic chemistry course enrolls students from the medicine major. As future healthcare professionals, medical students should also take on the responsibility of publicizing scientific knowledge related to human health. Therefore, starting from 2020, we have designed an assignment that tasked students with writing a popular science essay for…

Ludic-didactic material has systematically been proven to be a useful tool that enhances teaching and learning processes, at practically any educational level by reducing the stress level of students and creating a feeling of team spirit and trust. In chemistry courses, significant efforts have been made to improve the learning of intermolecular…

Inquiry-based laboratories were implemented into a General Chemistry Laboratory sequence, and the impact of these exercises on students' experimental design skills was assessed using a four-part assessment developed for this study. This assessment contained a multiple-choice section, a section asking students to explain their reasoning behind a…

Underrepresentation of some populations in STEM fields occurs because these students experience achievement gaps with performance lower on average than their overrepresented peers. Interventions to reduce achievement gaps and increase the retention of underrepresented students in STEM courses include approaches found both inside and outside of…

Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) incorporate research opportunities into the existing curriculum often by providing alternatives or replacing the traditional cookbook-based laboratory courses. Over the past 50 years, CURE courses have been shown to benefit both students and faculty members alike. Despite the large number of…

The reaction rate and rate law are chemical kinetics concepts that undergraduate students have difficulty understanding and applying in real life. A further challenge is the overall reaction rate of consecutive reactions. Herein we present a creative teaching practice using the analogy-based approach to exploit the similarities between the…

Students' negative perceptions of physical chemistry courses are well-known and are likely impacting their learning and performance in this upper-division course for majors. The syllabus can be the first interaction students have with a course and instructor and can be central to the expectations student set for the learning experience. While…

Students often experience difficulty in connecting knowledge from different college courses to solve complex problems such as ocean acidification, a pressing concern within the ongoing climate crisis. Here, we introduce a multidisciplinary activity in which students use their chemistry knowledge of change and stability in chemical systems through…

More than ever, there is an increasing need for digital experimental learning environments in chemistry. The variety of digital learning approaches provided to students range from simple videos showing experiments to highly interactive virtual laboratories. Regardless of which approach is chosen, a digital learning environment should be adapted to…

Student-centered teaching has become increasingly common in higher education as researchers have demonstrated its efficacy in recent decades. Herein, we hope to establish an efficient problem-based learning (PBL) method, which can help upper-division students learn organic chemistry content by combining teaching materials, experimental literature,…

Chemistry students are passionate about using their learning to contribute toward a sustainable future, yet they feel unprepared to make green and sustainable practical decisions informed by industry-relevant tools. Most green chemistry metrics are mass-based, which do not estimate environmental impact or help address global socioeconomic…