There is a gap between the importance of certain archeological material sources and their perception, both by professionals and by the general public. Textiles, for example, are essential to understanding practices that marked daily life and rituals in the past, but they have often been extremely degraded over time, particularly in temperate…

While scientists place high value on the scientific method, its relevance to everyday life is often opaque to nonscientists. In undergraduate teaching, its implementation is primarily apportioned to upper-level, laboratory science classes for majors. Herein we describe the modification of a recipe as a real-world project for learning the…

Over the past 20 years, significant effort has been devoted to advancing the modular approach to teaching chemistry laboratory courses. The development and implementation of two modules are presented here for teaching a second-semester physical chemistry laboratory course using the modular approach: an inquiry-based module concerning proteins and…

Contemporary society of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) increasingly requires the education system (i.e., the school) to train competent, creative and proactive professionals who will be able to solve real life problems. If society is to achieve this, some key paradigm changes must occur in education. The school must first prepare…

Undergraduate science courses typically rely on teaching assistants (TAs) to teach introductory laboratory classes. However little research investigates how to support TAs to implement reform-based teaching in undergraduate settings, and in particular, what factors may influence TAs' motivation to teach within reform-based instructional contexts.…

Enzyme purification, characterization, and identification are some of the best ways to introduce undergraduate students to many aspects of biochemistry, particularly as part of project-based learning (PBL). These kinds of multi-step laboratory experiments not only help students to better understand basic biochemistry concepts but also serve to…

While cheminformatics skills necessary for dealing with an ever-increasing amount of chemical information are considered important for students pursuing STEM careers in the age of big data, many schools do not offer a cheminformatics course or alternative training opportunities. This paper presents the Cheminformatics Online Chemistry Course…

Students learned the principles and practice of photometry through project-based learning. They addressed the challenge of measuring the unknown concentration of a colored substance using a photometer they were required to design, build, and test. Then, they used that instrument to carry out the experiment and fulfill the challenge. A photometer…

The role of faculty in higher education as knowledge disseminators within the knowledge and digital society can be completely redefined. This paper presents results from a video-based flipped classroom approach combined with a project-oriented learning arrangement. I show that videos combined with a project-based learning setting can be a powerful…

Presented is a project-based learning (PBL) laboratory approach for an upper-division environmental chemistry or quantitative analysis course. In this work, a combined laboratory class of 11 environmental chemistry students developed a method based on published EPA methods for the extraction of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and its…

As strong proponents of problem-based learning (PBL), the authors designed and taught an interdisciplinary, team-taught PBL course on Writing Science for the Public at a midsize northeastern state university. This approach led to emphasizing collaboration and experiential learning and resulted in media-rich student projects.

The Scientific Computing for Chemists course taught at Wabash College teaches chemistry students to use the Python programming language, Jupyter notebooks, and a number of common Python scientific libraries to process, analyze, and visualize data. Assuming no prior programming experience, the course introduces students to basic programming and…

James Madison University faculty team-teach an interdisciplinary mathematical modeling course for mathematics and biology students. We have used two different project-based approaches to emphasize the mathematical concepts taught in class, while also exposing students to new areas of mathematics not formally covered in class. The first method…

A multiweek organic chemistry laboratory project is described that emphasizes sustainable practices in experimental design. An emphasis on student-driven development of the project is meant to mirror the independent nature of research. Students propose environmentally friendly modifications of several reactions. With instructor feedback, students…

Matrix diagonalization, the key technique at the heart of modern computational chemistry for the numerical solution of the Schrödinger equation, can be easily introduced in the physical chemistry curriculum in a pedagogical context using simple Hückel molecular orbital theory for p bonding in molecules. We present details and results of…