Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has the potential to revolutionize the education sector. This study sought to determine the efficacy of ChatGPT to correctly answer questions a learner would use and to elucidate how the AI was processing potential prompts. Our goal was to evaluate the role of prompt formats, response consistency, and…

The paired-term biochemistry exam comprises five pairs of "unrelated" biochemical terms, where the collection of pairs, overall, is unique for each student. The student selects four of the pairs and answers three short essay questions about each, with a focus on how structure leads to function at the molecular level. Both…

What and how instructors assess understandably impacts student learning and performance in undergraduate science courses. However, there is limited research on the ways in which assessment practices might be altered to combat inequitable outcomes in these settings. Here we characterize the nature of assessment questions in one second-semester…

We present the results of having applied a set of options in thermodynamics courses for encouraging a strong student in-class participation and engagement. Strong emphasis is given to planned ahead in-class student Q&As encompassing both thermodynamics and statistical mechanics and supplemented with take-home extra syllabus reading.…

When students effectively engage with textbooks or videos prior to class, more active and collaborative learning activities can be incorporated into subsequent face-to-face learning. Such pre-lecture assignments are particularly important in flipped classrooms, where a portion of the content is delivered primarily before face-to-face instruction.…

Engaging students in scientific practices has become an important pedagogical component in STEM education, although its implementation in laboratories is still emerging. This paper uses three types of guiding questions to facilitate scientific practices in introductory and analytical chemistry laboratories. What makes our instructional model…

Question-embedded videos (QEVs) are learning tools that require students to solve problems and receive immediate targeted feedback while progressing through the video. As an effective learning modality, QEVs may be deployed for the preclass preparation phase of flipped classrooms. As flipped classrooms become more popular in STEM courses,…

Maintaining an element of active learning in the post-COVID-19 classroom was a challenge given the absence of traditional in-person interactions. This communication describes how the author used Socrative online polls to help bridge that gap for General Chemistry students in Spring 2020. The Socrative platform provides a versatile way to…

US colleges and universities have known for decades that higher percentages of racial and ethnic subgroups leave STEM majors, contributing to racial inequality in STEM professions. Many interventions have been developed, yet the disparity persists. A partial flipped pedagogical model is presented for a General Chemistry 1 (GChem1) course that is…

Video learning holds an important place in modern STEM classrooms, but more improvements to the learning experience are needed. In order to introduce active-learning components into assignments, questions are often deployed alongside videos. Unfortunately, many students tend to skip videos entirely and solely answer questions, bypassing valuable…

Of the 6.7 million individuals in the United States who are visually impaired, 63% are unemployed, and 59% have not attained an education beyond a high school diploma. Providing a basic science education to children and adults with visual disabilities can be challenging because most scientific learning relies on visual demonstrations. Creating…

An active-learning activity has been designed to improve communication and listening skills of students in an upper-level biochemistry course. The activity was modeled after "Around the Horn", a popular television show that features a moderator asking questions to various sports reporters and assessing their answers in scored sessions.…

Organic chemistry is often considered to be a difficult subject to teach and to learn, particularly as students prefer to resort to memorization alone rather than reasoning using models from chemical reactivity. Existing studies have led us to suggest principles for redefining the curriculum, ranging from its overall structure to the tasks given…

When students are introduced to the ways in which atoms are arranged in crystal structures, transposing the textbook illustrations into three-dimensional structures is difficult for some of them. To facilitate this transition, this article describes an approach to the study of the structure of solids through a well-known monument, the Atomium in…

The authors have developed "sequence response applications" for classroom response systems (CRSs) that allow instructors to engage and actively involve students in the learning process, probe for common misconceptions regarding lecture material, and increase interaction between instructors and students. "Guided inquiry" and…