Many of the current synthetic methodologies utilized within academic and industrial laboratories require knowledge of how to safely handle air- and moisture-sensitive reagents and work under inert atmospheres. As a result, the ACS Committee on Professional Training recommends incorporating synthetic methods that make use of these inert atmospheres…

We present the development and evaluation of "da Vinci's Curse", a chemistry escape room experience designed to consolidate laboratory skills in a fun and interactive setting. Inspired by the maestro, Leonardo da Vinci, the escape room challenges students to complete a series of puzzles in teams to escape "da Vinci's Curse".…

Chemometric techniques such as partial least-squares (PLS) regression have been applied with huge success to a wide array of chemical problems including multicomponent analysis of analytes in complex mixtures. Despite this, there are few examples of laboratory pedagogical exercises that involve students in the acquisition of chemical data from…

The laboratory course in organic chemistry for preservice chemistry teachers has been designed anew. For the course, only 2 weeks (8 h a day) are available. Therefore, we wanted to use this time effectively, which led to the following main goals: the students should achieve practical skills, understand the practical procedures they had to conduct,…

The setting of this study is a remote laboratory with a scanning electron microscope (SEM). The SEM is an advanced instrument used by scientists to characterize structures in the nanoscale. The remote SEM activity was structured to address different practices of laboratory inquiry. Secondary chemistry students were requested to prepare at home…

A multioutcome, guided inquiry-based liquid--liquid extraction (LLE) experiment has been designed for introductory organic chemistry. Multiple outcomes were established by identifying a series of red and blue dyes that are (1) soluble in organic solvent, (2) soluble in aqueous solution, or (3) soluble in either the organic or aqueous layers by…

Students in first-year chemistry classes come from a variety of backgrounds, with many students unaware of the qualities and behaviors of a professional scientist. Throughout their degree, students will gradually develop their cognitive skills, but they may not be adequately taught or assessed on their professional behavioral skills as a scientist…

Science anxiety, which is one of the affective dimensions in science learning, is one of the factors affecting success in Science and has been studied for 35 years. The existence of considerable negative attitudes towards Physics courses, which is one of the basic branches of Science, is a fact. This research has been designed to identify the…

Although science is a creative endeavor (NRC 1996, p. 46), many students think they are not encouraged--or even allowed--to be creative in the laboratory. When students think there is only one correct way to do a lab, their creativity is inhibited. Park and Seung (2008) argue for the importance of creativity in science classrooms and for the…

In an effort to achieve high success in knowledge and technique acquisition as a whole, a biochemistry and molecular biology experiment was established for high-grade biotechnology specialty students after they had studied essential theory and received proper technique training. The experiment was based on cloning and expression of alkaline…

Despite being criticised for placing little emphasis on thinking, the majority of laboratory work at school level is taught "via" expository "recipe-style" labs. This has been seen to result in students struggling to be able to apply the practical techniques they have learnt in the classroom outside the narrow environment in which they were…

We describe a 10-week laboratory course of guided research experiments thematically linked by topic, which had an ultimate goal of strengthening the undergraduate research-teaching nexus. This undergraduate laboratory course is a direct extension of faculty research interests. From DNA isolation, characterization, and mutagenesis, to protein…

Personalized medicine refers to medical care that involves genetically screening patients for their likelihood to develop various disorders. Commercial genome screening only involves identifying a consumer's genotype for a few single nucleotide polymorphisms. A phenotype (such as an illness) is greatly influenced by three factors: genes, gene…

For teachers, a common difficulty when introducing scientific thinking is finding ways to engage the participation of the students. Because most scientific problems require at least some specialized knowledge to formulate and solve, it can be hard to go beyond merely discussing the steps of the scientific method and illustrating them with the…

Responding to the concern from our faculty that undergraduate students do not have robust laboratory skills, we designed and implemented a strategy to individually teach and assess the manipulative skills of students in first-year laboratories. Five core laboratory skills were selected for the course entitled Human Biology, a large, first-year…