The purpose of this paper is to share the iterative process we used to design a task that elicits causal mechanistic reasoning and how the subsequent student responses can be analyzed. Our goal in this task is to strike a balance between eliciting as much student knowledge as possible without providing so much structure that the answer becomes…

We present two simple classroom exercises designed to explain challenging concepts in conformation for students beginning organic chemistry. These macroscopic demonstrations serve as analogies to bridge students' understanding of flat two-dimensional drawings to real three-dimensional molecules. In the first demonstration, an apple is drawn from…

Chemical thinking is a powerful tool for making sense of the material world and acting on it. But developing competence in chemical thinking may be challenging for students as it varies in several dimensions. This contribution seeks to guide and help chemistry educators in the design of learning experiences that support the development of…

Chemical reasoning takes many forms. The focus in this paper is on a reasoning process that facilitates using experimental evidence to make connections between macroscopic and submicroscopic domains, which we will refer to as "creating representation." It is a particular type of reasoning that has played a critical role in chemistry,…

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…

Nitrate is a crucial parameter for assessing water quality, owing to its dual function in ecological systems. These functions can be beneficial or detrimental depending on whether nitrate concentrations are low or high, respectively. The ultraviolet spectrophotometric method (standard as 4500-NO[subscript 3]--B) is a classic method for determining…

Herein we present an engaging description of the existent analogy between social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic and the collision cross-section of particles as defined in the collisional model for a chemical reaction. In addition, the link between collision cross-sections and kinetic rate constants is thoroughly established, bridging…

Environmental forensics is the application of knowledge from geosciences and chemistry in a legal setting, e.g., to determine the origin and consequences of contamination events. Teaching environmental forensics requires reactivating prior knowledge from different fields of natural sciences, filling knowledge gaps, and connecting pieces of…

Laboratory experiences are a key and integral part of the chemistry degree that are intended to provide the students the necessary training for laboratory work and improve their scientific reasoning/research abilities and their understanding of the uncertainty in experimental measurements. Despite the unquestionable capacity of hands-on laboratory…

Chemistry education research (CER) as a field is inherently interdisciplinary and has traditionally borrowed ideas, frameworks, and methodologies from other fields, such as anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, and science education more broadly. In this paper we encourage researchers to continue this tradition by utilizing the rich body of…

The formulation of a scientific prediction by students in college-level laboratories is proposed. This activity will develop the students' ability to apply abstract concepts via deductive reasoning. For instances in which a hypothesis will be tested by an experiment, students should develop a prediction that states what sort of experimental…

This article introduces the "Data First" approach and shows how the observation and analysis of scientific data can be used as a scaffold to build conceptual understanding in chemistry through inductive reasoning. The "Data First" approach emulates the scientific process by changing the order by which we introduce data. Rather…

The two main statements of the second law of thermodynamics were given by Clausius, and Kelvin and Planck. Other statements followed well into the 20th century. It is known that the two main statements are not exactly equivalent, although their differences may never show outside academic environments or very specific areas of science. At negative…

An introductory organic classroom demonstration is discussed where analogies are made between common societal hand contact and covalent bond formation. A handshake signifies creation of a [sigma] bond ("head-on" orbital overlap), whereas the action of praying illustrates "sideways" overlap and generation of a [pi] bond. The nature of orbital and…

In this article, the authors present an analogy that uses coins and graphical analysis to teach kinetics concepts and resolve pseudo-first-order rate constants related to transition-metal complexes ligand-solvent exchange reactions. They describe an activity that is directed to upper-division undergraduate and graduate students. The activity…