The laboratory is a complex environment where the three levels of the chemistry triplet coincide. As the laboratory environment places a large demand on the working memory of students, cognitive load theory can address overload which causes barriers to learning. Breaking down barriers requires iterative phases of analysis/exploration,…

Teachers' goals and orientations underlie their instructional decision making and can make the difference between "talking the talk" and "walking the walk" when trying to change lab instruction. Schoenfeld's "Resources, Orientations, and Goals" (ROG) framework was employed to shed light on the challenges involved in a…

Instructional physics labs offer students unique opportunities to develop an understanding of experimentation. By transforming labs to be more open ended and experimentation focused, instructors can better support student agency and choice. In this study, we examine students' overall sense of and perceptions about agency in two…

Laboratory safety is a vital part of a chemical education and can be incorporated into courses throughout the chemistry curriculum. Discussions of laboratory safety can serve as an introduction to the important field of green chemistry. Exposure to this field can better prepare students for safer and more sustainable laboratory practices in…

The goals for lab instruction are receiving critical attention in the physics education community due to multiple reports and research findings. In this paper, we describe a theoretically motivated scheme to evaluate instructional lab curricula and apply that scheme to three implementations of an electricity and magnetism lab curriculum. The…

Analysis of stochastic processes can be used to engender critical thinking. Quantum dots have a reversible, stochastic transition between luminescent and nonluminescent states. The luminescence intermittency is known as blinking and is not evident from ensemble measurements. In order to stimulate critical thinking, students design, perform, and…

Limited access to undergraduate research experiences for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics students has led to creation of classroom-based opportunities for students to participate in authentic science. Revising laboratory courses to engage students in the practices of science has been shown to have many benefits for students.…

Selecting less hazardous chemicals is a core tenet of green chemistry but is difficult to teach in practice. The upper-year undergraduate or graduate level exercise described here empowers students to make such decisions themselves. Students are tasked with finding the greenest chemical for a specific purpose described in a hypothetical scenario,…

A lab activity for teaching physics students the fundamentals of statistical analysis during the first few weeks of instruction is described. This activity involves students timing a pulse of light generated by an Arduino device of fixed duration with individual timers (e.g. stopwatch, iPhone timer). To select the most precise timing methods and…

Because traditional laboratory practices in advanced chemistry education are being replaced by inquiry-based approaches, we present herein a new laboratory activity based on a small research project that was designed and executed by students. The laboratory project aims at answering a well-defined research question: how far can potentiometric…

The instructional lab setting has been found to be dominated by prescribed tasks and pre-prepared lab kits. This was explained by teachers' need to guide students to simultaneously progress through a lab curriculum, which prompts them to standardize the lab experience. Nevertheless, prominent professional associations have persistently called to…

Laboratory sessions are designed to develop the experimental skills and the acquaintance with instruments that may contribute to a successful career in Biochemistry and associated fields. This study is a report on improving a traditional Biochemistry course by devising the laboratory sessions as an inquiry-based environment to develop the…

The method of least squares (LS) yields exact solutions for the adjustable parameters when the number of data values n equals the number of parameters "p". This holds also when the fit model consists of "m" different equations and "m = p", which means that LS algorithms can be used to obtain solutions to systems of…

A guided-inquiry experiment was designed and implemented in an introductory organic chemistry laboratory course. Students were given a mixture of compounds and had to isolate two of the components by designing a viable workup procedure using liquid-liquid separation methods. Students were given the opportunity to apply their knowledge of chemical…

Background: This auto-ethnographic study describes research conducted in a science teacher education program at a state university in Turkey, where I had taught the 'laboratory applications' course for the four previous years. While the students learned the basic skills needed to implement a laboratory course, I detected some deficiencies in their…