In undergraduate life sciences education, open educational resources (OERs) increase accessibility and retention for students, reduce costs, and save instructors time and effort. Despite increasing awareness and utilization of these resources, OERs are not centrally located, and many undergraduate instructors describe challenges in locating…

The "maker" movement is gaining widespread attention, especially in the field of laboratory education. Here we have built a low-cost, "do-it-yourself", open-source thermal conductivity cell detector (TCD) for chemical laboratory analysis, which is assembled from thermal conductivity gas sensor elements and 3D-printed flow cell…

State-level leaders face a difficult challenge of determining where to invest scarce professional learning dollars. To address this challenge, a team of researchers and state-level science educators surveyed teachers to learn more about their vision for science education and what kind of learning opportunities they preferred. The survey enabled…

For most students, completing practice problems is an essential prerequisite for success in organic chemistry courses. Practice work, however, is sometimes perceived to be easier than or even not related to the types of chemistry that students see in assessments and "real-world" science. This negative view may contribute to a reduced…

"Makerspaces, Innovation and Science Education: How, Why, and What For?" is an attempt to interrogate questions about the history, philosophy, and sociology of science and schooling that have long troubled science educators. In crafting the book, the author, Michael Tan, uses the microcosm of makerspaces to move back and forth to…

Productive struggle is a process in which students expend effort to grapple with perplexing problems and make sense of something that is not immediately apparent and beyond their current level of understanding and capacity. The experience encourages students to reflect on and restructure their existing knowledge toward a new understanding of…

Writing is an essential component of scientific activity. As such, it is necessary to develop strategies to provide equitable training opportunities for science writing. In order to provide learners with ways to improve their writing regardless of their language background and/or institutional and departmental environments, this article describes…

Catalysis is an essential concept in chemistry, playing a key role in industrial processes. Catalysis has been considered to be challenging not only for university students to comprehend but also for the teachers. In this Laboratory Experiment, we have described a simple activity for demonstrating the concept of catalysis using thread-based…

Introduction: Undergraduate research experiences prepare students for graduate training or employment. Statement of problem: At many teaching-intensive universities, there is a greater demand for research experiences than there are independent study opportunities. Students from typically underrepresented backgrounds may also be unaware of a…

This paper offers an exploratory account of the Nature of Geography (NOG) for geography education. The proposed NOG framework describes geography through the theoretical offerings of the family resemblance approach across the dimensions of: aims and values; knowledge; methods and methodological rules; practices; and geography as a…

The CHIMACTIV website (http://chimactiv.agroparistech.fr/) offers open educational resources related to analytical chemistry. It addresses a frequently encountered pedagogical issue: How can we encourage students to be more involved in learning during their courses (and especially during lab work) as well as provide a deeper teacher-learner…

What do we really mean by sustainability and why is biodiversity so important? What is nature-connectedness and how can it be developed? By exploring these questions, the need for education within this context becomes ever more apparent. This article takes you on a journey of sustainability, exploring the term from a variety of standpoints. It…

The Native American Medicine Wheel is a powerful tool to bring alive curricular connections from science and history to mathematics and civics as part of schoolyard gardening initiatives. As a living lab these gardens also serve as valuable tools to reinforce lessons on habitat enhancement. However, deeper lessons connected to the cultures of…

We present a model for sharing quantitative data in the field of physics education research and use it to present a newly available dataset as an example. This model is in line with calls from across physics and science more generally to democratize data and results through open access. The model includes suggestions for data collection, creation…

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many higher education institutions to offer their courses online, which is quite challenging when implementing laboratory sessions. Here we describe a web-based teaching resource consisting of a metallographic atlas with more than 200 micrographs corresponding to pure metals, binary alloys, steels, cast irons, and…