The novelty of the COVID-19 disease has paved the way to numerous scientific studies that aim to further understand its biology, and to different strategies that disseminate this information to promote public awareness. One of the strategies that the academe can employ is the inclusion of COVID-19 as a topic in a basic biotechnology course. This…

This exploratory, mixed-methods study examines first-year general chemistry students' written responses on a belonging survey. Responses were thematically analyzed to identify students' sources of belonging, which may help instructors choose effective strategies for enhancing belonging during the transition into college. Qualitative analysis…

This project focused on integrating an international component into the one-semester biochemistry course, a required course for biology, chemistry, and forensic science majors at the institution. A driving question was how to integrate the international component into the course while showing direct relevance to the course and students' lives.…

We tested the long-term effects of a utility-value intervention administered in a gateway chemistry course, with the goal of promoting persistence and diversity in STEM. In a randomized controlled trial (N = 2,505), students wrote three essays about course content and its personal relevance or three control essays. The intervention significantly…

Science is often portrayed as a meritocratic endeavor, but university biology programs exhibit high rates of student attrition, particularly among students of Color, despite similar interest and aptitude for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) as White students. Culturally relevant pedagogy is associated with student…

The COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique opportunity for a biochemistry course to cover the life cycle of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease. Adjusting the topics covered after the course transitioned to an online mode included switching to the chapters covering nucleic acid topics. The order of these related well to the…

Immersive research opportunities allow students to take ownership of their learning, explore based on curiosity, and engage in the scientific process while developing confidence and skills. However, research positions for biology undergraduates are limited, and conventional teaching labs are often restricted to pre-designed experiments without…

The most important learning objective in green chemistry education is the ability to identify the synthesis, process, or chemical that is least environmentally harmful. Existing metrics fall short for different reasons. Mass-based metrics fail to assess environmental harm, while life cycle assessment (LCA) is much too complex to insert into the…

Many high schools, two-year colleges, and universities offer a conceptual physics course for non-science students who have to take a basic science course. The students often enter the course unmotivated and may eventually withdraw. So, how do we make the course interesting enough for these students to gain the knowledge we desire and, more…

We describe a first-semester, integrated, introductory biology and chemistry course for undergraduates at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA, USA. Our vision was to create a supportive learning community in which students could comfortably make connections between scientific disciplines as they learned necessary content for subsequent courses,…

The call to improve undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education can be answered by undergraduate faculty modifying their course content and teaching methods to generate better student outcomes. The National Geoscience Faculty Survey--administered in 2004, 2009, 2012, and 2016--provides evidence that the vast…

A chemistry course designed as an elective for chemistry, biochemistry, biology, and pharmaceutical science majors is described. The course is designed for second- through fourth-year undergraduate students. The prerequisite is first-semester, second-year undergraduate organic chemistry with the second semester of the organic sequence as a…

Students come into the classroom with a variety of background knowledge. Therefore, it is imperative that educators are able to help all students, regardless of their familiarity with the content. Since it can be challenging for some large enrollment classes to schedule recitation classes after lectures due to logistical constraints, this study…

An introductory plant science lab offered by the Department of Agronomy & Horticulture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was adapted for online delivery. This paper describes the adjustments made for online delivery and examines students' perceptions of learning and engagement from surveys administered in both the in-person and online…

Geodesy is a very active and essential research discipline in geophysics but it is not a commonly studied subject at the secondary school or junior post-secondary levels. Far more frequently, gravity and gravitational acceleration are discussed, to some extent, in elementary kinematics or classical mechanics courses. This often takes the form of…